Roberto Coda Zabetta: Film 00—56

Fondazione Mudima presents Film #00—56, the latest project by Roberto Coda Zabetta (b.1975, Biella), a series of twenty large paintings that anticipate the full development of the project comprising fifty-six pieces.

In the works on display, forms, lights, shadows and colors from nature coalesce into an atemporal, nonfigurative flux of unending information. The eye glides fast along horizontal, vertical and concentric lines, rising to the surface and plunging into the depth. In spite of the immediacy of vision, a process of recognition is triggered that slowly reveals the painterly gesture, its references and its sources. An unconscious short circuit occurs: metal images do not unveil as much as they re-veal (veil once again), since they disclose and hide that invisible something the image is related to, seeking out that which is “unrepresentable” of this world, in a movement between high and low driven by the urgency to transcend the emotional condition of experience.

Abstract painting is a state of mind marked with significant restraints and boundless liberties: does it make a subject/object abstract or does it seize the essence? Does it add or subtract? Total freedom: does it really exist? Or rather, is painting capable of condensing infinite liberties? Perhaps, for Roberto

Coda Zabetta abstraction is the intimate place where‚ the mind’ can be left behind, where the multiple layers of life experience, its teachings and benchmarks can be excavated, where heaps of information are released in the free movement of soul and vision, in the sum of the opposites and of all that which escapes the finitude of perception and temporality. At the same time, it is also the place where the outmost freedom from those very reference points can be enacted with the awareness that each single gesture is laden with historical references but that it can also develop, knowingly, with disregard for all chronological classification.