Friday Focus: Attilio Esposito
Attilio Esposito is an Italian contemporary artist who condenses colour, light and movement within suspended amorphic imagery creating paintings that build a link between abstraction and academic painting.
Can you tell me about your practice? How do you get started on a piece of work?
I usually start shaping a piece of plasticine. I see this as the wildest part of my process, my head is free as well as my hands. I just wait to get a sort of fulfilment looking at it, then take pictures and move on with another colour or piece. In this part there’s like 10% of concentration involved and I like it.
Who or what are your biggest influences?
It could be a very long list of painters, architects and sculptors starting from XIV and XV centuries when the word represented wasn’t bigger than the surface of the representation.
Then baroque and rococò artists with the excessive decorations that steal the show from the subjects represented.
The classical compositions distorted by the arrival of photography and so on, until we get to nowadays where we can see everything condensed.
There is something surreal about your paintings, the suspended sculptural amorphic forms, floating between worlds almost, is that something that resonate with you?
Colours, lights and shapes are the fundamental elements in a representation, and as nowadays the world is full of images, it sometimes happens that I stumble on a combination that seems to bring my head elsewhere. This is what I’m trying to represent in these works. My choice to keep the forms amorphic is due to the idea that we give name to things only based on our own social cultural backgrounds, languages or experiences in life. When I asked myself “what to paint?” I was worried that if I had to paint for instance a vase, a chair or a fork, it was not a given that everybody in the world would recognise them as I do, if we think about this, we discover how weak communication is and our symbols are. So I decided to eliminate the signifier and free the signified. The title is my reading of it but everybody is free to find their personal titles, landing on a personal point of memories or imagination.
How important is the choice of material in relation to realising the concept of your work?
Plasticine has been and is fundamental in so far as we consider my paintings purely figurative.
Otherwise it’s part of a process, a tool that helps me get there.
What is your most important tool? Is there something you can’t live without in your studio?
I’d say greaseproof paper that I use as palette, chairs to sit on while looking at my work, and candies.
Can you give us a book recommendation that has been important in your practice? And tell us why it’s important.
I can't think of a particular title at the moment.
Recently I read for the second time after years, a small book from Pavel Florenskij called “ Le porte regali” (the royal doors). It’s a book about orthodox icons and their metaphysical value as representations. A bit heavy reading but it helped me moving my three neurons.
Finally, is there anything new coming up that you would like to tell us about?
I have a new painting of mine in an online group show called Return to mysticism at Hasbrook Galleries www.hasbrookgalleries.com
I’m about to complete three new works for Aucart. www.aucart.com
I look forward to more projects for the future!