Anna-Bella Papp and Chris Succo
Darkness and light, explored as opposite poles, are the exegesis of every artistic representation, the ends of a tangible philosophical logos, containing, in the space between them, inexhaustible chromatic universes. The everlasting struggle between black and white, archetypes of the laws ruling the known universe, reveals the inner nature of two entities ends which owe their essence to their reciprocal and indissoluble interdependence ”because one lives the other’s death and the other dies the former’s life”.
Chris Succo‘s and Anna-Bella Papp‘s works seem both oriented to the research of a balance between the two opposites, which ends in an incalculable and imperceptible modulation of greys and a neutrality which guards the transcription of an infinity of chromatic mixtures and of disclosed messages. Ruled by a strict composition exercise of shade annihilation, they give themselves up to the viewer with their elaboration and reduction of the gesture and with the eco of a narration which honours the true essence of a specific material.
As to Succo the balance starts from a text and from his signature developed as a sketch; Transferred on a canvas, the action and the colour stand above it, disintegrating the forms and reducing it to a reminiscence through erasures, returns of light and predominance of graphic elements. Choosing small sizes, Succo relocates his work into an intimate hemisphere, compressing all his reflections within the honesty of the paint media.As in a bichromatic mosaic, many disordered brush strokes organize and define three Text Painting by a dynamic and tactile gestural art.
Anna-Bella Papp chooses the same format and creates an installation more similar to a notes tableau, synthetic but with a strong evocative power. Three trilithic tables serve as an altar to six small raw clay planks where, for the first time, the image is not created by drawings but it is a logic and natural consequence of the drying process itself. Purified from every superstructure and not touched by any colour, they are intended as the representation of a “true image”, fully respecting a material which changes as time passes by. Small architectural actions of addition, disjunction and subtraction, together with chiaroscuro expedients, mark the clay planks and give back to the viewer a work which can be discovered individually, as an open project.
The exhibition developed on an implicit repetition of a rectangular module, which moves from the paintings to their horizontal supports, reaches a syntactic harmony in the structured concept of a surface structure and in the common merging in a desaturated and dryed chromatic palette with minimalistic characters. Drawing, density and thickness are the variables on which the exhibition finds its incipit and its balance.
