L.U.P.O. Gallery has opened the third edition of “Summer Fling,” a group exhibition that offers a look at the international art scene through the selection of six artists, mostly from London art schools. The body of work, entirely pictorial, is an essay on the state of contemporary painting produced by young artists, completely immersed in the present. Overcoming the complete abandonment of form, but also the figurative recovery from a certain art history season, the exhibition offers a perfectly poised synthesis between abstraction and figuration, while interpreting and elaborating on the most popular trends among ultra-contemporary painters. .
Julian Lombardi, “Forgotten Language”, 2024, oil and enamel on canvas, 180 x 225 cm, courtesy L.U.P.O., Milano
“Summer Fling” thus draws an ideal path, starting from the grotesque bodies by Brazilian Maya Weishof, charged with expression and color, to the paintings by Julian Lombardi, an Italian-American painter who, through an intricate thicket of brushstrokes, produces a form endowed with perspective and depth. Lombardi absorbs some of the practices of abstract surrealist painting, looking in particular to Chilean Roberto Sebastian Matta. Lombardi states that through the techniques of layering painting and building a visual fabric, he seeks to achieve a visual language that can dialogue with multiple cognitive and sensory levels of the viewer. In contrast, Laurena Fineus, a Haitian-Canadian-born painter, proposes figurative painting whose images mingle with the intricate naturalistic landscapes that form the texture of her paintings. The result purposely confuses the viewer, perhaps leaving behind an anguished trace.
Maya Weishof, “Bed Delirium”, 2024, oil on linen 174 x 194 cm, courtesy L.U.P.O., Milano
Gus Monday, a South African painter living in London, creates with precise, confident brushstrokes dreamlike domestic interior spaces in which perspectives simulate, leading one to imagine inhabited space as a living object. Katherine Qiyu Su, from China, is a colorist who builds dynamism through paint beams and drips, reminiscent of butterfly liveries, juxtaposed with curiously evocative and specific titles such as “Candle in the Easter Night Wind”. Margaret Ayres, from Texas, is the most figurative painter within the exhibition: her paintings are lucidly descriptive and accurately represent what they set out to tell. Only a cold and vaguely disturbing color palette distances any suspicion of painterly realism from her.
Gus Monday, “Reflection, after Frank Bowling’s Mirror”, 2024, oil on linen on pine-board 158 x 122 cm, courtesy L.U.P.O., Milano
The result of the survey of pictorial production proposed in this exhibition leads to one conclusion: young artists find points of reference in the great masters from the past. Maya Weishof, with “Bed Delirium,” reworks Manet’s “Olympia,” and in Gus Monday’s paintings we can sense some of the impossible staircases conceived by Escher. But none of these painters methodically follows the examples of those who came before them. While, as is obvious, art always reworks some narrative patterns, it is nevertheless interesting to find a common key among these reinterpretations. The veil that covers all the paintings seems to have an uneasy hue: the focal point of each painting is disharmony, whether physical or chromatic. The impression that pictorial art had found its point of maximum expression and perhaps conclusion in Rothko’s abstract expressionism or Lucio Fontana’s cuts has definitely vanished. Wanting to find a synthesis, and it is possible in this exhibition, it can be said that the young painters, born between the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, are again expressing themselves with figuration, but seeking a free expression in colors and forms, or reworking the themes of abstractionism and seeking an ordered form in the seemingly random composition of spots and lines.
Giovanni Beta
Info:
AA.VV. Summer Fling
26/06 –06/09/2024
L.U.P.O.
Corso Buenos Aires, 2 20124 – Milano
www.lupo.gallery
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