VORTEX SOLO SHOW – BOLOGNA, 2015

6 March, 18 April 2015 – Portanova12, Bologna

From the 6th of March to the 18th of April 2015 new works of “VORTEX” will be showned in Portanova12 Gallery.
Photos: thanks to Rosy Dennetta and Mario Covotta

“The sky is a plastered wall waiting to be painted with primordial signs, stray words that fall like scales from a black (or white) circle, that can be a new moon or a dawning sun. Or a black hole. In the beginning there was the word.”
Giuseppe Sermonti, member of The Osaka Group of Dynamic Structuralism.

Opiemme is in Italy with a series of shows entitled “VORTEX”, the Latin word for swirl, whirlpool, a reference to the spiral, a symbol of life, which mirrors the shape of our galaxy, the Milky Way, a perfect spiral.  Having been influenced by a book by geneticist Sermonti, “The alphabet falls down from the stars”, and by a fascination for all the mysteries governing the universe, Opiemme paints stars from which letters fall, like stardust. In Opiemme’s new vision, the universe is a symbol of perfect balance, and all ils elements are interconnected. An inspiration to Stephen Hawking’s “theory of everything” is beginning to emerge.

“Opiemme takes a leap and leaves the street art of his beginnings, making it evolve into a personal version of visual poetry,” critic Olga Gambari writes on the pages of “la Repubblica”, and again, “There is painting, which hovers on everything as a symbol, stark black shapes that leave a mark and transform primary signs and the alphabet into icons” (Torino, La Repubblica, 5^th March 2015).

There are two different style on the same theme: in the first colour is the protagonist, with a thick dripping that, when painting becomes more figurative, recalls pointillism, the action painting, abstract expressionism, and yes of course, J. Pollock; the second is characterized by sheets of old newspapers and maps, wherever painting is essential, minimal, dry, and basically black.

In the critical texts, his work is described by Maria Letizia Tega as at first “undermining de Saussure’s analysis, separating meaning from significance, there is no more mutual presupposition, and the letters are stripped of their role.They do not catch the eye of the beholder constructing words, they become just spots of colours, abstract elements.”
Daniele Decia further emphasizes how an abstract component appears in Opiemme’s work, defining it with a play on words combining informal and visual poetry, “informal letters”: “He creates images made of words (letters), and now these become fragments and the letters circle around, gaining a new abstract (informal) component.”
The connection and attention to art-history bring to a play with letters, to a design with words, and a work on poetry. This leads Opiemme to a deep closeness with Italian visual poetry, and with all those movements that have used the word combined with images. The artist himself admits he owes much to these movements, finding in gallery spaces, in white boxes, the perfect places for a dialogue with the avant-gardes of the past.
The research Opiemme did on “Vortex” makes it possible to the viewer to see the Turin based artist’s work in its entirety. Often defined “the poet of street art”, Opiemme constantly works to bring poetry into public spaces (without distinction between outside and indoor places) in order to take the texts closer to the eyes of the people who read them. Street art, in this process/manifesto, has always been just a medium for his works. The medium of freedom, in works which were inspired and are deeply characterized as public art. This is evident in a mural-tribute to Wislawa Szymborza in Gdansk, Poland, a site-specific work on a ten–story building, which was later appreciated by the Foundation of the 1996 Nobel Prize winner for poetry itself.
Opiemme thus continues working in a way that in galleries becomes even deeper, entering into the syntax of his search, showing us its different forms.

MORE PHOTOS HERE
WALL STREET INTERNATIONAL

Portanova12 Gallery
Via Porta Nova 12
email: portanova12galleriadarte@gmail.com
Hours: Mon/Sat 16.30 – 19.30
Mob 338 531 8469