Guardare negli occhi un coniglio

Guardare negli occhi un coniglio, solo show at Tommaso Calabro, Milano – June 27, 2024

installation view

works

Guardare negli occhi un coniglio (Looking Into The Eyes Of A Rabbit) is the first solo exhibition by Aldo Sergio (Salerno, 1982) at Tommaso Calabro in Milan, Corso Italia 47, on view from June 27 to September 14, 2024.

Aldo Sergio presents two new series of works, titled Ode to Zero and At Last, started in 2020 and natural evolutions of an artistic research spanning over a decade, characterized by precise, slow, and meditative painting. Ode To Zero is a reflection on beginnings and, at the same time, on the impossibility of the static nature of human thought.

In these works, several wooden tables – some austere like those found in sacristies, others simple and functional like the antique furniture in grandparents’ homes – are delicately hidden by immaculate tablecloths, soft and solemn, with delicate reflections. In the absence of other objects and mostly devoid of spatial references, the tables and their respective tablecloths, solitary and silent protagonists of the works, are imbued with a totemic aura, laden with symbolism.

For Sergio, tablecloths are objects of great complexity: the technical virtuosity required to create their details, from folds to lace, is second only to their metaphorical significance. Their mere presence is enough to compel the viewer to ponder everything that is absent and to imagine the infinite possibilities of moments that could unfold on those same white surfaces. If, in Ode to Zero, Sergio engages in a process of subtraction to reveal a painting of great complexity, such a subtraction reaches its peak in the At Last series.

In this body of work, everyday objects and moments, partly tied to the artist’s memories and partly retrieved from images taken from the web, are reproduced on the canvas by desaturating their colors and flattening their contrasts, bringing them as close to white as possible.

Attracted by the phenomenon of optography, which is the process of recovering the last image recorded by the eye before death, At Last thus becomes a reflection on the end: Sergio reproduces on the canvas the object before it slips away from his memory, or before it is lost again among the pages of the web, enveloped in a warm, all-encompassing light, as the view of a person seems to be at their last moment of activity.

The works in the At Last series are the result of a long and slow creative process, which involves careful calibration for each color tone to make the image visible, but only after focusing on it, and only for a moment. A vivid and elusive image, difficult to capture, just as it is difficult to look straight into the eyes of a rabbit.