Divario<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By Julie Crenn<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Naples, Claudio Coltorti studied ancient and modern literature at university. He got bored and worked in bars and\nrestaurants. In 2010, he left Naples to settle in Paris. He ended up back in bars and restaurants. In the evening, he would draw.\nSmall formats, ink on paper, splodges intertwined with pencil drawings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Encounters took him to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in\nParis where he studied for five years. In Jean-Michel Alberola\u2019s studio, Claudio Coltorti was surrounded by painters. Seduced\nby the curiousness of this medium, he took to brushes and to colour. At the same time, he was really shocked by the discovery\nof Francis Bacon's works at the Pompidou Centre. These bits of his story give an introduction and some perspective to his\npictorial exploration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the Maia Muller Gallery, Claudio Coltorti brings together a collection of paintings made in 2019. Two slightly older works\ninfiltrate the selection. Uomo di niente (2018), \"the man of nothing\", was his first attempt to represent the human figure in his\nwork. Until then, he drew and painted objects; \"what surrounds the human\"1. He observed and depicted the elements of a daily\ndecor that implied a human presence. This presence was simply suggested by a cup of coffee or an enigmatic screen. Uomo di\nniente features an orange silhouette arranged in a defined space. Even if the silhouette, expressed as a line, is clearly drawn, the\nbody is just colour and abstraction. The piece heralds a new pictorial exploration that mixes the figurative and the abstract with\nwork like Curtain (2019) and Peppe the fishmonger (2019). Here, the curtain and the kitchen are pretexts to explore materials,\ncolours and light. Work with the human figure leads him to paint scenes that he recalls from his own memories, or sometimes\ninvented or well-observed situations. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Without models, he paints with a certain distance to these subjects. Through the series of\nwork, he builds a directory of motifs: a cigarette, heavy hands, a notebook, ankle boots, a cup of coffee. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Inspired by Renaissance art, ancient Greek sculpture and the works of artists such as Louis Fratino and Lenz Geerk, Claudio Coltorti aims to create \u00aba painting that belongs to painting.\u00bb <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Painting that is not only defined by the era in which it exists, but\ninstead within a history of painting without defined time limits. He says he is looking for \"a temporality that is similar to ours in\norder to see reality differently\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1 All quotes are from a telephone conversation with the artist, May 2, 2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is through this gap in perception, memory and time that one finds the poetic dimension of his\nwork. The paintings \u2013 on canvas, wood or paper \u2013 present scenes of daily life: a person sleeping at the counter in a cafe, a\ncouple embracing, the bottom of a skirt, a woman who smokes. Still through this gap, we find the clues of our time: a\nsmartphone, a football field, the metro, the pattern of a cloud printed on a sweater, a car, a computer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The artist is currently working with the light generated by screens, and the way it radiates onto faces and objects. The light is never brilliant, or aggressive, on the contrary, it is almost completely dimmed. It exists enough to define the feature\nand to reveal bodies and objects. It plunges us into an intimacy and an interiority that is intensified by the choice of extremely\nsmall formats. \"The paintings are objects, they fit in the hand\u201d. Between the historical and the contemporary, between the\nsfumato and the thick smoke of a cigarette, Claudio Coltorti works the complexity of a painting that exists in the gap, that of an\nalmost indefinable space-time open to our subjective narratives.<\/p>","protected":false},"featured_media":21269,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false},"tags":[6],"class_list":["post-21268","exposition","type-exposition","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-passees"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.maiamuller.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/exposition\/21268","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.maiamuller.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/exposition"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.maiamuller.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/exposition"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.maiamuller.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21269"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.maiamuller.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21268"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.maiamuller.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21268"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}