IN YOUR SHADOW

The relationship with origins (the relationship with the shadow) marks the history of western representation.

Victor I. Stoichita, A Short History of the Shadow

The title “… in your shadow” (a detail drawn from the Song of Songs) aims to underscore a course that the artist has been steering since the start of his career, in which a close link with shadow seems to be the essential principle of his work. Often in fact the coloured shadows that spread on the walls, almost as if seeking to grasp the entire surrounding environment, appear to be direct emanations of the forms that generated them rather than merely the result of interposing an opaque body between the source of light and the wall/screen. But even when the works do not explicitly employ this pictorial mechanism they dialogue with shadow understood as a cultural tradition (one example being his 2000 architectonic installation “Via d’ombra (Shaded Alley)” in the grounds of Villa Medici in Rome). His approach does not consider the world as a purely and hierarchically luminous phenomenon, a vision that relegates shadow to a simple manifestation in negative of light and brightness (both physical and intellectual); he sees it rather as an autonomous and hospitable entity to be inhabited by body and mind.