Tales from another world | Gianluca Pisano

About

"Born in Sardinia, I have lived in London since arriving in 1996, bringing with me a fascination for the large dark surfaces of the Baroque paintings found in churches throughout Italy.

I studied Fine Art at the Accademia di Belle Arti. The school was staffed by excellent artists whose practice tended toward either abstraction or conceptualism. Their teaching provided the contemporary critical context within which to develop my work.

The focus of the work is divided between the human figure and the landscape, each re-interpreted to include contemporary themes. For instance, my worked canvases are concerned with the abstract shapes and surface textures of the painting as object, whilst the dark content of the paintings is concerned with the intensely human condition of being situated in a strange world.

Whilst I have worked with digital art and made images through computer technology, it is important for my work to return to the medium of painting. If the abstract and conceptual aspects of my paintings are contemporary, their presence recalls the Baroque, especially the painters who pursued and developed Tenebrism, from the Italian, tenebroso (murky), also called dramatic illumination. It is a style of painting using very pronounced chiaroscuro, where there are violent contrasts of light and dark, and where darkness becomes a dominating feature of the image. It is a great pleasure to look at Italian Baroque painting and, in particular, to imagine myself in a dialogue with the masters.

 I learn from looking at those paintings and in my various research readings I have gone back to centuries old methods that pay attention to the medium of painting.

The use of dramatic illumination affords the paintings an air of mystery. Mystery is powerful in attracting the human mind, leaving the narrative incomplete so that the spectator is puzzled or left in a state of wonder. More broadly, the contrast between light and dark suggests the difference between that which we know and are, therefore, able to contain and control; and that which lies beyond our present epistemological capacities. In philosophy, the enlightenment promised illumination, but acknowledged e realm that remains beyond our grasp.
These paintings, then, are redolent of our place in the shadows, afforded as we are glimpses that seem to make momentary sense of our place in the scheme of things.
​The spectator and the artist are both struggling to make sense of the particular narrative partially contained in the picture but partially obscured by the darkness from which the image emerges. It is in the patterns of illumination and shadow that abstraction and narrative content combine to form these painterly pictures."

Quote from the artist's website http://www.gianluca-pisano.com