PIETRO ROCCASALVA – STRANGE YOUNG NEIGHBOURS
2012-02-20Roccasalva explores the potential for art objects to become active agents of simulacrum, sites where the animate and inanimate worlds undergo profound crossing. Painting serves as the orbital center for a practice that includes sculpture, performance, and video, and that has increasingly come to represent a self-contained universe of poetic narratives and philosophical inquiries.Roccasalva has referred to his paintings as ‘microchips’, devices that organize an ever-expanding network of processes and allusions. Synthesizing compositional strategies drawn from religious iconography, modernist collage, and digital distortion, and skillfully rendered over months and even years, the figures in the paintings are both deeply familiar and impossibly strange. They freeze the gaze and conjure the sense that though artworks can never be fully understood, they are caught with their viewers in an endless feedback loop of exchanged signification.
The Strange Young Neighbours borrows its title from a standalone tale in Goethe’s 1809 novel Elective Affinities. In the story, a near-catastrophic drowning plays a key role in uniting a young couple destined to be together since childhood.
Opposite – You Never Look at Me from the Place I See You, 2012
Exhibition runs through to March 24th, 2012
David Kordansky Gallery
3143 S. La Cienega BlvdUnit A
Los Angeles
CA 90016
