Chelsea, New York: 532 Gallery presents Whispers in the Twilight, a show of brand new paintings from Italian-born artist Fulvio Gonella, whose vibrant, primitive brushwork and whimsical effects mark the advent of a bold new presence.
Since Fulvio Gonella's teenage years, he has been enthralled by the realm of art brut, a domain where diverse perspectives craft distinct realities. His current paintings combine the tenets of this radical artistic movement with a highly gestural style reflective of street art, graffiti and graphic design, and folkloric imagery. The results combine ferocious visual energy with a whimsical, mysterious sensibility redolent with evocative imagery drawn from an abundant imagination.
Traditionally, art brut artists, in the words of Ian Chilvers, "create their works for their own use as a kind of private theatre," motivated by an endogenous psychodramatic drive. Gonella takes the dynamic a step further in that his works are created for the use of the viewer, as opposed to the artist; "Whispers in the Twilight" comprises a public theatre of sorts. The Italian artist's latest exhibit, and his first in the United States, introduces American art-lovers to a brand new set of visual strategies and aesthetic possibilities. Gonella's paintings have three essential aesthetic dynamics, which interact and overlap in ways that operate in a kind of symphony of unreality.
The first element in this visual carnival is the nearly aggressively crude and gestural signifiers that Gonella constructs. Using a salmagundi of paints and colors, liquids, crayons, oil stick, enamel and found materials — literally “mixed media” — Gonella populates his canvases with sketched-out outlines of stick figures with primitive faces, while objects are depicted in assertively flat renditions. To call the draftsmanship “childlike” is both nearly irresistible but also misnomenclature, for underneath Gonella’s primitive brushwork lies a sophisticated understanding of form and visual structure. As the critic Andrés Isaac Santana put it, Gonella’s “pieces do not respond to ignorance regarding an established cultural tradition or the absence of artistic training … on the contrary, he works from the most complete understanding of the artistic field and from a strict organization of ideas.”
