Artist : Filippo Sciascia
Genre : Painting
Period : August 20 till September 11
Everyday, 9.00AM till 10.00PM
Location : Gaya Fusion of Senses
Jl. Raya Sayan, Ubud.
Tel: 975895
In the early 1970s, a group of artists developed a style of painting that was to be referred to as Hyper-Realism. Their work was based on images of reality as seen through the photographic eye of the “film” camera. The use of photographs as a source material “cooled”, or “distanced”, the painted image. Hyper-Realism reproduced the chemically processed photographic image as near as possible but on a much larger than life-size scale. Portraits, in-particular, were analyzed through the “film” camera lens in an almost scientific manner, without the presence of the artist. Absent from the works were emotional or traditional painterly techniques. The exaggerated scale of the portraits revealed a new reality - a “hyper-reality” - that the original photograph could not display. In his exhibition, “File 98-04”, Filippo Sciascia’s art displays much in common with the Hyper-Realism school.
However, while the Hyper-Realists used a photographic “film” camera to capture reality Filippo has replaced the artist’s eye with that of the video or digital lens. These captured images of reality are then used as the source of his paintings, the aim being to create a relationship between the medium of oil painting and video which are not seen as related. These “video paintings” are created on a grand scale. Extremely large portraits of Balinese women adorn the walls of the gallery in bold, bright statements of black, red, grey and white. Filippo’s paintings also display various technical processes of how video can electronically capture and manipulate an image.
Many of the paintings, such as “Red Tone”, reproduce precisely, but on a large scale, what the video camera sees, while others, such as “Pixel 6”, are treated by video effects such as digitalization or solarization. The aim of these particular paintings is to analyze how the human eye perceives reality by physically forcing the viewer to focus on deciphering the images. Other paintings also reveal Filippo’s fascination with the mechanics of the video medium. Paintings, such a “Kadek 2”, display computer information relative to post-production video editing techniques and image selection.
This exhibition is primarily about selections. Choices are made in the size and color of the paintings, the placement and cropping of the images, and the retention or dismissal of inherent technical processes. But, the most crucial choice is the selection of the image itself. Video is created by the projection of 24 images per second on the cathode-ray tube of a television monitor. In any given second there are 24 choices of basically the same material available. What makes the chosen image special? Why has one image been chosen as opposed to any of the other 23 available selections? Filippo provides no answers to these intriguing questions. What he does provide is an exhibition comprising of reproduced fragments of time. Tiny slivers of time that express moments of heightened reality. Christopher Isherwood’s famous statement “I (eye?) am a camera”, has been superceded by Filippo Sciascia to read “I am a video camera. I select and paint what it sees”.
