ANTONELLO VIOLA
ROME, ITALY
PAINTING, OIL AND GOLD LEAF ON JAPANESE PAPER AND GLASS
Antonello Viola was born in 1966 in Rome; received his degree from the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome in 1989; after a long period of study in Spain, he received a PhD from the Fine Arts Department of the University La Laguna.Teaches decoration at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna since 1996. His work was exhibited in Rome, galleria Il segno; Milan, Galleria L’Affiche, Bolzano, Galleria Goethe; Frankfurt, Carloni Spazio Arte and Peter Bauschke Gallery; Wien, Gallery Image, Italian Cultural Institute; New York, Magnet Gallery. Lives and works in Rome and Bologna.
In his works on canvas, paper or glass, Antonello Viola traces a chromatic perimeter where, through a process of accumulation, stratification and sedimentation, the canvas becomes a place devoted to meditation and the research of the absolute.
The artist converts invisible into visible with thin layers of paint that are then scraped, removed and deleted. The painting’s quiet surface is animated by signs that reveal what lays underneath, the deep, pulsating matter that ultimately gives shape to the work. The artist’s visual experiences and the memory of them are absorbed by this process of stratification and sublimated in the pureness of colours: rarefied gold, translucent turquoise, elegant red-brown.
Through the material density of his work, Viola establishes a renewed dialogue between the inner dimension of the work and the environment that surrounds it. The pictorial space is defined by the artist with four straight lines: rectangles that frame pure mental dimensions, filled with colour and silence. The artist does not act instinctively or empirically, but moves from this specific starting point, the drawing of a rectangle or a square. This simple shape is intended to hold the colour in its perimeter, a fence whose boundaries are instead constantly exceeded by the vibrating energy of the act of painting. These graphic devices immediately become undefined as, through a strategy of accumulation, the artist ends up rejecting limits by making colour triumph over structure.
Viola establishes a new relationship with the modern tradition of monochrome painting, where the reduction of the pictorial vocabulary corresponds to a positive and constructive understanding of the world, which perception is renewed through the energy of colour.
“The sedimentation of the chromatic material, with its concretions and its impalpable roughness, becomes a backwards journey where the pulsating life in Painting is rediscovered.
The artist creates in this way an existential dimension in which fragments of memory are immersed in the flow of painting and merged with both matter and time.”
