In the clarity of disquiet the human being lives. Images and thoughts are produced and consumed. Feeling and sentiment waver in reality. Acceptance and conception are rusty keys of a carnal vault. Powerlessness and nostalgia, the art of the sublime, pure and social romanticism.
Lucas Memmola, “Stella del mattino”, oil on panel, 30 x 40 cm, 2024, ph Irene Guerrini, courtesy the artist and Galleria Tiziana di Caro
Lucas Memmola (Bari,1994) welcomes conflicting emotions into his work, leaving it to his hands to execute a reasoned thought, a recondite thought, as silent as it is deafening. He is an artist with a multiple signature: the works he creates are concentrations of elements like agglomerates of vibrations. If the human being is an animal endowed with intellect, Memmola dissects its intimate nuance, that which is not visible, but intuitable through gestures. Gestures that he pours into art, starting from more constructed works, such as sculptures and installations, to recovering a traditional, iconographic and classical painting practice. Focusing on painting, figuration is the research field with the most heartfelt fascination, because it conducts metaphors and allusions to bare, raw reality. A reality made of dreams, illusions, pleasures, static and dynamic, seasoned with that spiritual and artificial light that illuminates the superfluous and obscures the essential.
Lucas Memmola, “Melancolia”, exhibition view, 2024, ph Irene Guerrini, courtesy the artist and Galleria Tiziana di Caro
Galleria Tiziana di Caro in Naples inaugurates the young artist’s first solo exhibition titled Melancolia, a name that encapsulates a sensitive, rational, human research. The term indicates a state of profound mistrust, of a latent pessimism, which induces one’s conscience to be disturbed and to close oneself in a sort of safe zone that is anything but comfortable. With a few works on display – only five paintings – Lucas Memmola offers a dual aesthetic reading: romantic and painful feeling clashes with the effigy of contrary images. There is a polarity of intent in the paintings.
Lucas Memmola, “Breath”, oil on canvas, 110 x 76 cm, “Melancolia”,oil on canvas, 113×148 cm, 2024, ph Irene Guerrini, courtesy the artist and Galleria Tiziana di Caro
A sun, an urban landscape, an orchid, a horse and a porn star. Five subjects that lead back to a real sphere, each with its own intimate and extroverted relationship, disconnected from each other, but at the same time relegated to the same universality. A sun that heats and generates life can destroy and destroy itself, it is a cosmic as much as atomic energy, a reminder of those artefacts born to win and dead to make up for it. An urban landscape, seen in the darkest night, generates a tension as acute as the time of its impermanence, wondering what will become of tomorrow is equivalent to the time of those lit artificial lights, their control, their destiny. An orchid alludes to the genesis of pleasure, fleeting pollination of that welcoming and sometimes dramatic nature, deflowering of disconcerting thoughts. A horse runs free towards the spectator, energetic, workaholic, a clean white almost idealised, hopeful. An acephalous porn star is chiastic in her posture, statuesque in her limbs, with contemporary features and details, the object of desires and illusions, impulses and mutations.
Lucas Memmola, “Melancolia”, exhibition view, 2024, ph Irene Guerrini, courtesy the artist and Galleria Tiziana di Caro
With his five paintings, Lucas Memmola tends to identify the object with the other, the other with a real emotion that cannot be denied. Nostalgic and social, the melancholy of his art is the subject of a perpetual historiography that not only goes into figuration, but is strongly linked to reflections and relationships with the other. The freedom in feeling causes a kind of security in the gestures and sign, which from art and its formal aesthetics touch each other.
Info:
Lucas Memmola. Melancolia
06/04 – 25/05 2024
Galleria Tiziana di Caro
Piazzetta Nilo 7, Napoli
https://www.tizianadicaro.it/
Art Curator and Art Advisor, graduated in Visual Arts and Cultural Mediation, with Master in Curatorial Practices, born in 1995, lives in Naples. He collaborates with Galleries and Independent Spaces, his research is mainly focused on Emerging Painting, with a careful and inclined gaze also on other forms of aesthetic language.
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