Lucio Salvatore: Black Square | New York City

Dates: October 17 - October 31, 2019

Opening Reception: Thursday, October 17, 2019 @ 6-8 p.m.

Space Gallery St Barth is proud to present a comprehensive solo exhibition of paintings, mixed media works and photography by Italian artist Lucio Salvatore with a selection of 15 pieces, mostly created between 2013 and 2017 of the Black Square series.This comprehensive selection of Salvatore’s Black Square works were previously shown in 2017-2018 at the Museum of Modern Art (MAM) Rio de Janeiro and in 2014 at the Centro Cultural Correios, Rio de Janeiro.

"We inherit the earth and we build the world with it... and put this land in the fragile condition of a matterpermanently transformed in new landscapes and meanings" (Lucio Salvatore).

The Black Square is a series of artworks developed in stone quarries that, as often happens in Salvatore’s artworks,are the result of a combination of process appropriation, recording of experiences, sculpture and painting. Salvatore creates a topology of the stone walls of a functioning quarry before they are reduced to sand and dust. The artist ephemerally transfers the forms of the rock on canvas through rubbing (frottage). The imprinted monotypes preserve the form of the stone before its illusionary solidity subsequently crumbles under the quarry’s operations.

In 2014-2015 on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square, Salvatore painted a black square on the walls of the quarry and subsequently extracted this painting from the wall with an excavator. The process reduced the Black Square into hundreds of rock fragments, each carrying black marks of the painting.Later Salvatore sewed these fragments on a canvas imprinted with the stone’s form and the result was a powerfulcreation with an ‘internal dialectic tension between unity and multiplicity, matter and immateriality’. (Fernando Cocchiarale, Curator of the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro).

This work became the centre of Salvatore’s Black Square body of works where in his words, the artist meditates onthe connection between ‘the metaphysics of forms and the concreteness of a human industrial (un)-sustainable wayof creating new worlds’. An imaginary lineage of archetypical abstract geometric form is traced between ancient philosophies, prehistorical signs, ethnic cultural traditions and modern art concepts and gestures.

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