I am a visual artist and a lecturer. Placing painting at the centre of my practice, I’ve worked with both traditional materials and unconventional ones such as plexiglass, plastic, fabric, carpet, mirror, and found objects. These different supports and materials give me opportunities for unexpected expressive qualities and to explore painting as an experimental field. Additionally, I realised artist’s books, fanzines and site-specific projects in both exhibition spaces and educational contexts.
My work can be contextualised in what art critic Raphael Rubinstein called “provisional painting” in regard to artists as Richard Tuttle, Mary Heilmann and Raoul De Keyser. He reflects on “works that look casual, dashed-off, tentative, unfinished or self-cancelling” by artists who “deliberately turn away from ‘strong’ painting for something that seems to constantly risk failure or inconsequence”.
I am interested in the process involved in making a painting, in its material qualities, in the relation between contingency and necessity. I collect and reuse materials and imagery from a variety of sources (personal archives, art history, books, the streets, empty shop windows, discarded objects) composing like a musician does, and keep the paintings in the studio for months in a ruminative process where accumulation, slow decision making, impulsive actions, inspirations and contaminations filter across the paintings in a sort of ecosystem.
I often use landscape as a conceptual motif to arrange the visual elements in compositions that I desire to look inevitable as if they could not bear another stroke and casual as a mikado game.
LORENZO
MODICA
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lorenzomodica@gmail.com
all works courtesy of
Lorenzo Modica