We are pleased to invite you to the opening of AN INTIMATE EYE, second solo exhibition, at the Andrea Nuovo Home Gallery, by the Neapolitan artist Paolo La Motta from 11:00 to 19:00, in via Monte di Dio 61, Naples.
An Intimate Eye refers to a romantic and introspective gaze but anchored in the reality of the environments and characters that appear there. As an attentive and omnipresent observer, the artist takes snapshots and captures moments in the chasm of everyday life, stopping on the experience of each place marked by the traces and signs of the individual as he passes by. However, what occupies the central place in the artist's works is not the tangible presence of man but its exact opposite: his transience, the lability of existence that forces us to remember and transcend, accepting the chimera of eternity.
La Motta is known for both his pictorial and sculptural work, he portrays and models –without illustrating– urban landscapes, its contours and the one who lives there. On display are 20 new pictorial works by the artist in which intimate and collective spaces are emphasized in their expressive autonomy, returning heterogeneous fragments of today's imagination to the observer in an interpretation that contains persistent and circular references between the elements present there. His language is full of metaphorical figures, a construct of semantic stratification, graphic and evocative, as in “The Green Room”, where, while recognizing the connection and familiarity between the subjects, one is transported to a possible and distant universe. Each layer of paint, wash, and sketch is simultaneously an allegory, evoking a mental image and reconstructing a shared experience, as in “Arazzo,” where the artist invite on a journey to discover places that hold small fragments of human history. In “Donna in azzurro” or in “Parete gialla” a clear psychobiological path appears to indicate a trail that must be retraced and experienced by the person standing in front of it. Because this is in fact what happens with La Motta's works: each of them is a narrative chain system, constructed through degrees of abstraction that push to enter, dismantle and rearrange the underlying mechanism that goes beyond the pictorial material and the brushstroke. La Motta's imaginary matrices – including cinema and music – intersect and translate into a syncretism articulated by a corpus of messages and latent meanings that are hidden in the compositional elaborations of his works. His signature is found precisely in the pictorial quality, in the deliberately reduced palette and in the use of a direct and synthetic language from which emerges a play of deformed shadows, facets and angles, where nothing is truly what it seems because each element is stuck to a recent history or to a distant space and time.