Cassina Projects is pleased to present Anticamere, the debut solo show by London-based Italian artist Norberto Spina (*1995) with the gallery.
Toying with a sense of hermetic foreboding while also nodding at the actual display conceived by the artist, the exhibition meditates on the intersecting of memory, perception and form.
An imposing dark wooden structure erected in situ stands halfway between the outstretched back wall and the columns which part the white cube. A room within a larger room. Not a space of in-betweenness, but a sturdy construction. Somewhat familiar, solid matter touching upon manifold visual and emotional chords. As if memory were to be given form. One single painting hangs placid at the far back of the wooden-clad chamber. A work within a larger body of work displayed across the gallery walls.
Norberto Spina’s paintings seem set in a desaturated tentacular past. Their photographic origin distils gravitas. Aloof in their placelessness and filmic quality yet eerily voyeuristic, his poignant renditions of archival imagery spanning from uniform-clad children in a post-war Italy to equestrian vestments and paraphernalia, seek to unearth the socio-political implications of persuasive power dynamics ingrained in educational frameworks through the prism of family and society at large.
His thick cross-hatching compositions traverse a non-linear temporal axis. They braid together personal fragments and collective mementos, religious iconography, historical excavation and cultural observation, emphasizing painting’s contemporaneous agency in the reformation and dissemination of the visible.
Blobs of clotted paint dot the rippled surfaces reminiscent of wood grain as the layering of earthy tones applied with vigorous oblique strokes in an obsessive build up and wear away of markers and oil paint, echo the ebb and flow of human trajectory.
