Strange Matter

About

Fabio La Fauci’s (Italy) work, often inspired by Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism, and oscillating between abstract geometry and organic reality, escapes all attempts at artistic classification.  His works’ intrinsic plastic ambiguity enables a transformation, the passage from one form to another form and from one meaning to another meaning. This process derives from the artist’s subconscious, from his most hidden fears and emotions and art becomes, in this perspective, a sort of catharsis.

Born in Cuba and currently residing in Berlin, the painter Juan Miguel Pozo Cruz purses a mythological, narrative pictorial language in his work that distinctly rejects the discursive, instead seeking the symbolic significance of personal and collective memory. Lost mythologies intermingle with the legends of large cities. Alongside a tangible enthusiasm for the historical and anecdotal on Berlin’s streets and the facades of its buildings, the fragile, sun-drenched beauty of Havana also comes through in his formal compositions. On Pozo’s canvases, multiple layers of color and different painting techniques overlap with one another. Broken surfaces and deliberate gaps are reminiscent of peeling poster, creating surfaces that are both timeless and nostalgic. His strictly conceptually structured compositions combine motifs – some of the original, others he has found – with frequently recurring graphical elements.

Arny Schmit (Luxemburg) is a storyteller, a conjurer, a traveler of time and space. From the myth of Leda to the images of an exhibitionist blogger, from the house of a serial killer to the dark landscapes of a Caspar David Friedrich, he makes us wander through a universe that tends towards the sublime. Manipulating the mimetic properties of painting while referring to the virtual era in which we live, the Luxembourgish artist likes to surprise by playing on the false pretenses. In his paintings he creates bridges between reality, fantasy and nightmare. The medieval, baroque or romantic references reveal his profound respect for the masters of the past. Extracted from a different time era, decorative motifs populate his compositions like so many childhood memories, from the floral wallpaper to the dusty Oriental carpet, through the models of embroidery. Through fragmentation, juxtaposition and collage, Arny Schmit multiplies the reading tracks and digs the strata of the image. The beauty of his women contrasts with their loneliness and sadness, the enticing colors are soiled with spurts, the shapes are torn to reveal the underlying, the reverse side of the coin, the unknown, the duality.

Dominik Schmitt (Germany) comes from the deep south of Germany, from a town called Neustadt an der Weinstrasse. His artworks comprise paintings and drawings, but also video art. He manifests his anatomical introspections in a both morbid and ironic way on canvas and thereby addresses subjectivity as well as questions about art and its conception. Despite all modernity Schmitt makes
formal use of elements of the Renaissance and christian iconography.