For many years Antonio Sannino (Naples, 1959) has amused himself by painting the sea, pretending to be a figurative painter and playing at being an abstract artist: the result is glowingly beautiful, and his pictures – skilfully painted on aluminium using a special technique and, for this reason, even more brilliant – are on the borderline between the representation of water and an interplay of colours in which the liquid element is barely recognisable. The viewer can therefore immerse himself equally pleasurably in water or colour, because they are equally transparent. The same sense of transparency persists even when Sannino tackles other subjects, such as cities and woods. In the latter works he experiments with a technique that guarantees an almost Pop flatness: the use of resin capable of vitrifying oil colours spread over an aluminium support. The result is a thin, smooth surface that enhances the compositional depth, a sort of no-landscape, by means of which the artist no longer seeks to represent reality, but alludes to it, preferring to grasp its most intense expression. His metropolises – cityscapes portrayed at dusk or night – appear sparkling in the reflections of windows, with buildings depicted in chaotic perspectives seemingly in motion, and even pieces of sky that are the result of a profound vision rather than a mere reproduction.
Bilingual edition in Italian and English. Translated by Lauren Sunstein for Scriptum, Rome.
€ 32,00