CLAUDIO SPOLETINI / IL COLLEZIONISTA

curated by Italo Bergantini and Alessandro Trabucco


November - December 2012

17th Floor and Ground Floor

ROMBERG Arte Contemporanea + ROOMBERG ROMBERG'S Project Space - Latina (Italy)

Installation view ROOMBERG ROMBERG'S Project Space - ground floor - photo credits Marcello Scopelliti

Installation view ROMBERG Arte Contemporanea - 17° floor - photo credits Marcello Scopelliti

EN_

Fascination for collecting has no age limit. No matter how slight it may be, it can reach different strength.

It’s a craving desire, an unstoppable longing to various kinds of objects, whose property fulfill entirely the collector with positive effects.

In this particularly tough time the collectors tend to cut costs for buying items that are not for primary use, however in certain cases the strong drive to the desired object might be a recklessly brave action, to be overcome concerns and hesitations.

After twice solo show at Romberg Gallery in 2005 and in 2008, “Fabbricato in Italia” and “Fabbricato in Italia 2”, this third Claudio Spoletini’s exhibit completes a long time study he dedicated to his true love, his passion for toys, presenting a series including about twenty new works, and two big papers.

Claudio Spoletini express himself trough two different media, photography and painting, entailing into his works these various objects both physically, in photography being able to integrate them into the photographed context and making them part of the scene through an accurate study of the shooting point and proportions, and metaphorically in painting, with a realistic depiction of each toy into characteristics landscape. In Claudio Spoletini’s paintings indeed is persistent the presence of the massive and hardy architecture of the Italian factory, which can be read as either origin of the production of the small objects portrayed, or in a more symbolic level as the theater of social development, the world of work and toil, of claims of the rights and workers' struggles, of productivity and growth of a nation, a world now almost disappeared and replaced by virtual technologies.

Nearly obsessively Spoletini draws the symbol of the factory in operation, a smoking chimney spreading its gas in the sky.

Mostly are sights from above, overviews that allow to seize the architectural structure as a whole, a background that was, in the early paintings, nearly always monochrome and unreal, emphasizing the realism and the solid three-dimensionality of toys that walk the streets or sail the skies.

In recent works the object dematerialize itself turning to a mere white outline, just the outer structure of the toy’s shape, and the industrial landscape loses its proper geometric rigidity by flaking in a paint of post-impressionist memories, with loose brushstrokes that mimic, in certain cases, the pixels’ "serrated" effect of digital images, the "bricks" that built the information of the new electronic image. With unnatural and solid colors, Spoletini strengthens the expressionist feature of his paintings that depict human beings only as unvarying copy of their beloved toys that have now become just thin silhouette floating into space.

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