Visual Infinity
Feb 20, 2021 - Mar 27, 2021
curated by Massimo Scaringella
Then another kind of vertigo seizes me, that of the detail of the detail of the detail, and I am drawn into the infinitesimal, the infinitely small, just as I was previously lost in the infinitely vast.
Italo Calvino (American Lessons)
It is not a coincidence that, at the beginning of their creative adventure, many artists based their work on seeking a balanced and universal art, thinking of it as a means of achieving harmony that adapts to reality. Therefore, beyond the formal structures typical for pictorial works, it is not uncommon to discover their poetic vein, their true absolute essence, in which sensitivity is conveyed through an intelligent and organized distribution of different elements of the painting that, put together, make up its visual image.
According to Alberto Giacometti “The goal of art is not to copy reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity” and it is certainly undeniable that, at the heart of the artistic work of Costanza Alvarez de Castro, it has always been a careful reading and interpretation of what surrounds us through the adaptation of the details in which the representation of reality focuses the analysis and study on specific factors of the concept. Hence, in the latest cycle of works gathered under the title “Visual Infinity”, the artist is strongly attracted by the decomposition and recomposition of forms in space that allow her to enclose a sensation of finite and infinite within the determined perimeter of the canvas. The artist then enacts the contradiction of the imaginary favoring the colors and layers of the material, which resolves the surface through tones and suggestions of the shades.
Whereas the poetry that comes from colors and their combination evokes inner evolutions that show a certain inclination to the expressiveness of the concept. This one is emphasized even more by the search for simple colors, with light overlapping that sometimes does not neglect the inclusion of a strong material component inherent in the reproduced object. Carlo Carrà said that “the painting must grasp a relationship that includes the need for identification and the need for abstraction” and the material elements that we find on these canvases, such as the various types of propellers, bollards, compasses, inkwells, etc. originate from her shunning from a traditional vision, from the search for a specific conception, sometimes delimiting the recognition of their origin, from the essential as well as unavoidable emotional intensity.
Within the always-well-finished canvas – rules the horror vacui, depriving the composition of empty spaces. Genuine is the enjoyment that the artist seems to feel in hyper-describing and maniacally defining each element dissolving the hierarchical order in force among things, where details become protagonists – “painting is more about capturing than representing” (Philip Guston).
The sensation of taking directly from reality and the immediacy of the carefully constructed image derives from the recurring photographic style. The choice of subjects, handed down from personal memory, additionally tells us about her refined taste for what’s “less-observed”, for the artifice capable of surprising, for the unusual points of view also present in many previous works. The perspective tends to surprise in a way to accurately reveal all the elements of the subject to show it from multiple points of view. Modulating it to her liking, on the contrary, she is free to decide what aspect of reality she wants to display. A reality in which, like the poet Gibran Jalil Gibran says, “art is a step from nature to infinity”.
Massimo Scaringella
(Translation by Jelena Cerović)
