The Galleria La Nuvola in Via Margutta hosts, on Saturday 2 March 2024 at 6 pm, the performance by Silvio Coiante (Rome, 1982): THE TEAR. The exhibition, curated by Alice Falsaperla, consists of the ad hoc creation of a large-scale work within the historic spaces of the Gallery. Coiante is a contemporary artist, trained between Rome and London, active in Cologne, who uses the papier collé (“glued paper”) technique as his compositional practice. As the French terminology suggests, it involves the creation of the work of art by combining pieces of paper glued onto a support, also made of paper.
At first, Coiante makes use of a personal “iconographic diary”, taken from multiple contexts that the author develops over time. He draws on his own photographs, from the web and from history, synthesizing them into a single, impactful and unusual physiognomy. Following this collection of images, the artist recovers the manual element by making a sketch, on paper or canvas, until experimenting with the assembly technique, where a figurative contamination occurs: the digital interpenetrates mythology, the historical flows into contemporary. The paper, first painted, then torn and finally superimposed on a wooden frame, becomes the fulcrum of a creation in which sequential planes and tonal contrasts follow one another.
Coiante’s work seems to alter the idea of traditional figurative representation: instead of capturing the forms of the world, the image is made up of “fragments taken from reality, of those corners of matter that already exist with their signifier”, explains Alice Falsaperla. «The tear becomes the interference between the precision and the randomness of the gesture», specifies the artist, shedding light on the dualism between “the rule” and the negation of it within his production. Here, the random element manifests itself twice: in the action of the tear and in the accidental overcoming of the color, which goes beyond the image, reaching the outline that “lays out” it.
In the first case, the artist decides to leave the white and irregular signs of the tears, as “border lands” placed as a connotation of his expressive investigation. In the second case, the edge becomes an emblem of “error”, a key element also in international artistic research between the 1950s and the 1970s, which today places graphic rigor in dialogue with emotional urgency. On the occasion of Silvio Coiante’s performance, the public will not only be able to witness in situ the methodology that shapes the compositional process of his works, but also access a refined selection of them.
The exhibition, which can be visited until March 12, is made up of a combination of classical representation and contemporary portrait, connected in a single liminal space.
