PRIMITIVE
12 January 2025
Vito Stassi and Francesco Costantino in the exhibition Primitives organize in a single text the different tensions that run through their works. What is created is a space without pre-established thematic coordinates, traversed by the innate force of the primitives, the philosopher’s stone of so much of the twentieth century, but also marked by the masters of the fifteenth century translocated into a kind of morgana from time to time gentle, mocking, tender, naive. Where Stassi confronts illusion with the immediacy of gesture, in a kind of hallucination that can resemble the x-ray practiced on a fourteenth-century panel, Costantino works by superimpositions that, as in cave stratifications, do not erase but encompass. His innate taste for fast, immediate, chromatically charged composition (Costantino boasts a past as an underground graffiti artist) sometimes meets the uncorrupted domain of nature or still life. Stassi, on the other hand, with the guidance of spontaneous drawing, stages faces and looks that are like transparent, light veils, memorial apparitions or self-portraits in disguise.
Rarely do the original components of creativity mark the space separating what is a painting from what could become a painting. Contrasting custom with the freedom to materialize uninhibitedly the deepest impulses of the imagination, even to entrust one’s hand to the automatism of one’s inner ancestors, may constitute, perhaps even depending on one’s momentary temperament, a demon to be opposed, or it may take on the features of an attitude so recurrent that it becomes a destiny. Thus the impulse toward what is ancestral and childlike can gradually create a world populated with idols, fetishes, symbols and things, simple things, as elemental as a drawing or a spontaneous memory, all mysteriously eloquent.
The event is sponsored by the City of Palermo.
MARTHA – Music ART House Academy joins the 20th Day of the Contemporary.
Free admission
For more information write to info@marthapalermo.it or on W
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He is one of the young voices of new Sicilian painting. His work opens up to the eye like a collage of ordinary fragments surfacing on a diaphanous skin: membranes, tamed liquid bodies immersed in a nature told through pale marks and quick chromatic shifts. After completing his studies in Italy and France, he worked as an assistant to the artist Aleksandra Mir. His first solo exhibition, Deadline, a reflection on portraiture and identity at the independent space Zelle Arte Contemporanea, was followed by group shows in Italy and abroad. He was creative director of the periodical Post, published by Mimesis. A co-founder of Azoto Project & Communication, he has curated projects with artists such as Lovett and Codagnone (Manifesta 12), communication campaigns, and workshops on graphic design and printing with artists such as Monica Dengo and Max Fish. francesco-costantino.tumblr.com
Born in Palermo in 1980, where he lives and works. In 2006 he graduated in painting from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Palermo. Since 2002 he has taken part in several group exhibitions in Italy and abroad. His most recent work consists mainly of small and medium-sized pieces of a metaphysical character, in which rarefied, almost gaseous images seem to withdraw from painting, staging a disappearance only to resurface through graphic marks.
