Only Love
Corso Magenta, 61 – 20123 Milan, Italy
Antonio Sannino at Fondazione Stelline Milano – 24th October 2018
Liquid art system is delighted to present the new exhibition by Antonio Sannino at Fondazione Stelline in Milan.
The opening of “Only love”, curated by Angelo Crespi, will be on the 24th of October 2018, at 18:30.
The exhibition is produced by Liquid art system and it can be visited till the 18th of November 2018.
The urban landscape is one of the obsessions of many modern and contemporary painters. After all, the poetics of modernity arises precisely when Baudelaire meanders around the 19th century Paris and describes its developing contradictions, whereas his coeval Pissarro portrays it as frantic and colourful. In the 20th century, the flânerie becomes a genre practised by writers and artists: Rilke in Paris again and Boccioni in Milan with his “The city rises” are the avant-gardists who celebrate the only available visual horizon. And, in fact, nature only exists in the arts as mere refuge for the nostalgic.
Also Antonio Sannino, as contemporary artists, surrenders to the charms of the urban landscape. He is a painter with a strong classical background, who has been painting metropolises – in addition to wonderful aerial views of the sea (an almost abstract perspective, far from the traditional landscape painters as Guccione) – for several years, especially sparkling views of New York at dusk or at night, which looks shimmering when it is reflected in the glass windows or coloured lights; the buildings portrayed in messy perspectives seem to be in motion, and also the portions of the sky are the result of a vision rather than a mere reproduction. Furthermore, the newly created technique allows the Neapolitan artist a pop-ish flatness: the use of a resin capable to vitrify the oil colors laid on an aluminium medium which results into a thin and smooth surface which enhances the depth of the composition. Sannino creates a “landscape equivalent”, a sort of no-landscape by which the artist does not want to represent reality any more, but he hints at it by getting its strongest expression, which often is crowded and compromised by the architecture; an even more deeply rooted feeling in this exhibition called “Only love”, where the vivid spiritual message becomes an integral part to the landscape, as if it was a subliminal contraindication vis-à-vis a merely iconographic reading of the work, in which a sense of loss prevails and the absence of the human traces is clearly expressed: in this way, the outsider observer become the protagonist of the painting, re-adapting lines as landscape, made alive by his feelings. Everything generates love, and the world itself wouldn’t exist without our lovely eye.
FONDAZIONE STELLINE
Corso Magenta, 61 – 20123 Milan, Italy
For many years, Antonio Sannino has been enjoying painting the sea pretending to be a figurative painter whilst playing to be an abstract artist: the outcome of his “shining sea” is a shining beauty, and his paintings – skilfully painted on aluminium with a special technique and, for this reason, even shinier – are borderline between the portrayal of water and a game of colours where we can barely recognize the liquid element. Hence, we dive with the same pleasure into the water or into the colour, since they are equally transparent.
