Silvia Mei, Andrea Fiorino, Painting

press release

Silvia Mei, Andrea Fiorino

---

Silvia Mei, Andrea Fiorino

Painting

13 September to 16 October 2014

Reception: Saturday 13 September 2014, 3pm to 7pm

Opening preview: Thursday 11 September 2014

Andrea Fiorino

Statement:
My work is to tell stories that fascinate me and that I would want to live. To do this I make use of certain recurrent images that I consider particularly mine. I try to communicate static situations, suspended, ambiguous, in which the figures and the environment coexist. I try to unite to the image an instinctive chromatic sensibility, adding elements a few at time and layering them. The figures represented are often naked and melancholy, sunk in the sadness of lost beings in a world that neither you nor they recognize. They hang suspended, as if without gravity, covered in symbols and leaves, branches and clouds and sea. Their gaze is averted, as if they felt spied upon by unfriendly eyes. The titles of the works and the names of the series are for me fundamental, and they often contain the meaning of "my" reality and of what I represent. The papers and the canvases are self-referential and autobiographic. I try to see and to remember as child, and like a child I paint with the fingers. Imagining a history now lost, I try to leave some trace of the childish aspect that I see within me.The support becomes my skin.
13 September 2014

Silvia Mei

Statement:

The pieces that I have in this exhibition are summary of the work I've done in the last three years, they are all works on paper or canvas. The most recent works (2014-2013) are characterized by colour that is more present and more alive. These are self-portraits, and portraits of friends and family. Anatomically correct, but less human and more animalistic, so as to highlight our true nature and essence. The characters are often forced into the natural environment - leaves and plants as well as birds of prey, and black darkness, the symbol of sorrows and anxieties that haunt the mind and body. This driving force has no logical or precise pattern, yet each work is linked to episodes in my life. In the works "In mente tu", "Nel mio cuore terra", "Dagli occhi piante, dal cuore occhi", for example, I deliberately made the subjects blind even though I placed eyes everywhere else in the body, in order not to feel the pain I created in the heart of a person I loved. Life events experienced physically and mentally become my paintings, subjected to changes based on what I am feeling and according to the development of the painting. In any case I always prefer never to give precise denitions. I love it when the viewer is free to see what he wants in my painting, and want it that way...

---