Curated by Stefano Castelli

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OSART gallery presents "Non io," a solo exhibition by Filippo Robboni (Novara, 1980, he lives and works in Milan). Since the beginning of his career, Robboni has pursued research on figuration that tends to rethink the canons of the genre, adapting them to the instances of our time both in an aesthetic sense and in terms of content. His painting lives of two concomitant and intentionally jarring phases: while he refines to the highest level the exactness and richness of painting and representation, he challenges from within his own subject and the canons of the figurative tradition.

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The exhibition "Non io" is entirely composed of watercolors, a new test-bed that allows Robboni's research to move toward marked characteristics of synthesis and formal boldness. The human subject is here brought to the maximum of tension: the texture of the painting is condensed in delineating the complexion, suspended between subsistence and disintegration; on the other hand, the composition and conception of the figure subject the subject to torsions, fragmentations, rotations, pushing the portrait to the maximum of tension, a moment before the breaking point. Faces are caught in ambiguous expressions and gestures, broken by irregular geometries that make the white backgrounds as constitutive as the painted areas. 

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The extreme unconventionality of the treatment of such a classic subject as the portrait constitutes both an experiment in the linguistic possibilities of painting and a pressing questioning of the present and future fate of the individual.

 

The exhibition includes a dozen large-format works.

 

In addition to a text by the curator, Stefano Castelli, the exhibition is accompanied by an essay by Giuseppe Genna, one of the leading figures in Italian literature today.

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