Kubrick

A TRIBUTE TO KUBRICK

In the past few years, the Italian artistic environment has been affected not only by the come back of the figurative style, but, among the most important factors, by the need of facing the painting using different expressive means, going trough parallel routes that could bring the everyday life – restless and full of spurs -, the visions of the history – public or private -,the landscape – scenery of the future, disturbing present or distorted past – to the canvas as a screen where we project our life.

The media (as in the past centuries for the arts) are continuously crossed by citations, interferences, influences, reflections.
The painting is more and more a ground open to every kind of connection: the past masters, the roads opened by the realism or by the abstraction, are no more considered, not only at least; there is much more than that: from television to cinema, from cartoons to fashion, from music to videogames, from trash to trendy, from design to graphics to internet…you can name it.

It happens, even if the big international reviews, some critics, many directors of museums and some magazines had asserted, for a long time, that the painting was an outdated mean, an obsolete technique, pressed by a heavy tradition, unable to renew itself, not suitable to the contemporary world.

Painting was for an artist also a choice of field, a position taking that, in the last ten years, brought to the stage a new generation of artists who gained the national scene, claiming everyone's attention with their increasing strength and tenacity, demonstrating, in many cases with an extraordinary talent, that the painting, far from dying, was, on the contrary, well alive more than ever.

Fabrizio Musa is one of those who, even if strictly adhering to this practice (territory familiar since many years), move over parallel planes, use the different opportunities offered by the languages.
Joining techniques and media to different stands, in his production he alternates open minded images sourced by his private life (photos of friends, faces, every day's events) to those of famous rationalistic architectures (like the recent series dedicated to Terragni), to stolen movie frames – it is the case of this tribute to Kubrick – to landscapes and glimpses, postcard style, of the cities exciting him (as the project of the Lombardy's cities).

Musa, as already said, selected the painting together with the photography and the new technologies, through a constant game of cross references, an only apparently delicate balance, which requires a deep dialogue.
His visions are immediate and quick like from a shutter click and they are able to catch and stop that unrepeatable moment, which is typical of the mechanic and the electronic tool.

The image – a frame like a printed photo – is the starting point, not as a document or reminder stolen to support the memory, that testifies a presence, a well reasoned choice useful to deliver the aspect of the place or of the event, witnessing an effect with peculiar features, chosen among the many and different ones that the artist has met.
Like in this exhibition, where he selected seven cult movies by Stanley Kubrick: A Clockwork Orange, 2001 Space Odyssey, Full Metal Jacket, The Shining, Barry Lyndon, Lolita, up to Eyes Wide Shut.

He revisited them, he paused on the details, on the shots, on the light, on the photography and through a technique – complex and original, made by many steps – brought them on the canvas.
The artist chooses the frame (or, as already said, a photo), he prints it, he transfers the image to the scanner and he elaborates it, reducing the original image to its essence.
At this stage, he eliminates whichever color, shade, tone, and nuance.

And when he goes to painting his vision is even more reduce: in fact, on the canvas Musa summarizes, strictly in black and white, the number of pixels by which the frame was originally made, getting to a simple but effective structure, which does not objectively reproduce the reality from where he started, but which is anyway strictly connected to it.
He keeps moving from an objective vision of reality, but his reality takes us to a world which we understand a dialogue between existing and possible, between present and virtual.

It is almost a paradox: the more precise is the reproduction technique, the more subjective is the result, reached by choosing the elements to reduce and the elements to delete, as cutting the image, as restricting the view field, and so on. This process is feasible also because Musa does not take pictures with the goal of translating them into painting (in this case his canvas would have something repetitive or serial).

On the contrary, he produces his paintings like sixteenth century landscapes, he carefully studies the light, he favors the reduction of the colors, the contrasts, the break points of the scene.
The glance is captured by the likeness power, the style rigor, the vision lightness.
Lightness because, while being detailed and precise, his stroke fragments the viion integriti, overemphasizes the shelling and makes the image nearly transitory to the spectator's eyes.

The figurative aspect is highlighted in the representation of the subjects, but, as other routes covered by Musa, it is not completely exclusive.
The figuration is dominant, but in some works the shapes are concise and essential so that they are close to the abstraction; if from one side his painting is flat, extremely detailed, in other areas the surface gets nearly of matter, the brush stroke less defined and, in some works, is pused to dripping; more, if from one side Musa prefers the colors reduction, sometime he shows small red, orange, blie area, spread under the different layers of black and white, in a constant game of overlaps, erasures and sudden, but well designed, discoveries that do not forget the aesthetics research.

An example? A Clockwork Orange txt 01, where two blood red striping are aside of Alex's face, the protagonist, as an omen of the violence of which he is first the author and then the voluntary spectator.
In this painting, as in Shining txt 01, Odyssey txt 02, or Barry Lyndon txt 01, Musa gives a different breath to the images, joins the rigorous structure (sometimes not without optical style geometrical games) to the essence of the vision, to tones of movies memory, to achieve a never expecte synthesis, which winks to the Pop icons tradition and to the latest technology and glamour edges.

Emma Gravagnuolo