Paintings by Filippo Sciascia and Ugo Untoro,
at Biasa Art Gallery, Jl. Raya Seminyak 34, Seminyak.
Tel: 7442902.
Filippo Sciascia and Ugo Untoro’s collaboration exhibition, simply entitled ‘Sciascia/ Untoro’, can be viewed as an exercise in the nature of Art. The dichotomy between the intellect and the emotional. Both are figurative painters but each goes beyond recording the visual, stressing the artist’s role as an active creator rather than a recorder of the external world. Filippo’s controlled and considered ‘photographic’ paintings present the artist as the ‘organizer’, or the ‘architect’, of the pictorial world, while, Untoro presents the artist as the dreamer, his world populated by people of the imagination.
Each artist shows seven works that are made on agreed themes: Cezanne, Crucifixion, Light, Flower, Portrait, Shadow, and Water, and five works made jointly. For six months each artist worked at their own studio, and came to themes by talking via phone calls and SMS. Ugo, from Yogyakarta, then visited Filippo at his Bali studio where they worked together. Filippo offered ‘five finished’ canvases as the platform for their collaboration.
Filippo Sciascia is a Bali based artist born in Palma Di Montechiaro, Italy, 1972. His interest lies in the photographic image. Indeed, it has formed the basis for a long term examination of the conceptual interface between a photographic image and the material processes of painting. Sciascia transforms technology assisted photographic images into ‘brushwork’, using a fresco painting technique on canvas The result is a textured crumbling impasto image. Much of his work simulates, or is based on, popular images of paintings from the history of art. His canvases impact on the viewer’s consciousness by recognizing the images or certain gestures and poses. They must be seen in terms of their faithfulness to their source, and the skill with which Sciascia succeeds in translating photographic images into brushwork.
Ugo Untoro was born in Purbalingga, Central Java, 1970. He graduated from the Indonesian Art Institute in Yogyakarta. Hailing from a background related to street graffiti art, his signature style is raw and spontaneous. Wrought full of irony and existential questioning, Untoro’s lonely figures in silent and bleak interiors have a tangible connection to society’s margins.
Sciascia and Untoro’s different artistic approaches are readily seen in the pieces created on the theme ‘Portrait’. In the historical Western tradition, a ‘portrait’ reveals the outer, visible truth of the person represented. In a modernist tradition, the emphasis moves to showing the painter’s idea of the internal portrait of a person. In both cases objective or psychological truth remains present. Filippo’s ‘This is his F# Portrait’ and Ugo’s ‘Portrait of Filippo’ denounces the commonplace idea of the portrait. Filippo’s portrait remains within the norm. It still depicts a character, but the character is disfigured. Filippo questions the notion of beauty. Ugo’s portrait is more radical. It presents the contours of an empty human shape. For Ugo, the notion of the representation of a person is to be nonexistent or illusory.
Controversial images of Christ are a potent way to question religion, and to question the evolution of the representation of the figure of Christ in European culture. In addressing this theme Ugo and Filippo are dealing with something laden with strong emotions. Filippo’s work, ‘Crucifix’, is moody and somber, and recalls the numerous Hollywood visualizations of the crucifixion in popular films ranging from ‘The Robe’ to ‘The Greatest Story Ever Told’. In Ugo’s ‘Give me a Cross’, Christ is seen without his cross, from the back, as if ashamed of what people have made of his sacrifice.
Another theme chosen by the artists was the work of ‘Cezanne’. Filippo’s ‘Two Men drinking’, is a contemporary recreation of Cezanne’s painting ‘The Card Players’. It is a subject associated with drinking, and as an occasion of sociability. Adapting Cezanne, Filippo has chosen to present a moment of meditation. Two drunks concentrate on their drinks, without a show of joy. Further, Filippo recalls Cezanne’s pictorial structure. The flat planes, shallow depths and shifting perspective. Ugo’s ‘Two Men Drunk’ transforms the bar into a dreamlike terrain, distilling reality down to a bold composition and symbolism. The drunks are insignificant, and are swamped by the bar, and they are located on the top right-hand corner of the painting.
The works created together could appear gimmicky. The chances that two different artists can work successfully on the same canvas seem remote. However, the works succeed, and they can be attributed to the fictional artist ‘Sciascia Untoro’. Filippo’s art always rests on the manipulation of photo images, but it is Ugo, in these ‘Sciascia Untoro’ works, who gives the ultimate touch of meaning to the pieces. ‘Sciascia Untoro 1’, shows a well- structured, digitally-engineered face created by Filippo, over which Ugo has superimposed a haunting black and white skull. In ‘Sciascia Untoro 2’ Ugo seats a black man back-to-back with Filippo’s white seated girl, creating a sense of a lack of communication between the two. In short, Ugo augments Filippo’s primary images with his own signature feeling of existential angst.
Sciascia and Untoro’s collaboration has made them question the notions of suggestive themes and icons, in a manner they would otherwise never have explored. There may be a lack of cohesion among the works, but it has made them deal with topics in ways they might never have found possible. The exhibition displays a depth they could possibly never have achieved alone.
