KOSMOS - Exhibition of Contemporary Art by Fabio Modica

Catania - Italy, April 16, 2016 (Newswire.com) - Press Release

 

Palace of Culture - Catania

 

KOSMOS

 

Exhibition of contemporary painting by international artist Fabio Modica

 

Opening: Saturday April 16, 2016 – h 18.00

Free entry

 Palace of Culture - 122, Via Vittorio Emanuele II - Catania, Sicily (Italy)

Monday to Saturday: 09:00-13:00; 15:00-19:00  |  Sunday and holidays: 09:00-13:00

April 16 - May 11 2016

Infoline: +39 327 016 84 66

The exhibition of contemporary painting entitled "Kosmos", by international painter Fabio Modica, opens at the Palace of Culture in Catania on April 16, 2016 at 18:00, with the patronage of the City of Catania. Following his successful 2015 solo shows in the United States, where he is currently being represented by four contemporary art galleries, Fabio Modica is finally making his artworks available to his hometown audience at the prestigious historical complex of former monastery St. Placidus, known today as the Palace of Culture. After the show, the paintings will resume their journey to the United States.

Thirty massive paintings by the artist will be shown at this illustrious venue until May 11, 2016. The catalog will be made available to visitors in each room during the opening and for the duration of the show.

Nature, mythology and art of painting. "Kosmos" is a blend of suggestions that arouses a thrill of pleasure even in the most inattentive viewer. On display, extremely large paintings, some more than two meters wide, where gesture and color are powerful masters of the surface and never bend to a concept or an idea. Every single canvas reveals the artist's desire to create a whole universe, in which abstraction and figuration strive to blend in harmoniously in a constant balance of equal and opposing forces. A never-ending struggle that, according to ancient philosophers, has caused the cosmos to generate and preserve itself in time and space, as well as the work of art that follows its laws.

Professor Nino Arrigo, in his critical introduction to the exhibition catalog, wrote:

This exhibit, a sort of anthology of Fabio Modica's artworks, reconnects Sicilian viewers with their Greek origins. While coming to terms with his ripeness as a man, Modica, now "in the middle of the journey of our life", seems to have reached his ripeness as an artist and portrays himself as a ripened artist with "cosmological" ambitions. It is, indeed, upon that Kosmos that he fully draws, a Kosmos of harmony and disharmony, of love and hatred, of matter and spirit, of the onset of philosophy, of the pre-socratics, from Empedocles down to Heraclitus.

Fabio Modica's work has for some time been introduced to private collections of well-known personalities from the entertainment world, and has had a tremendous success in the United States. Far from being another victim of "brain drain", Fabio Modica is, rather, a "healthy carrier" of our roots overseas. A monumental "Persephone Kore", about three meters wide, overwhelms the viewer at the entrance of the Mandarin Oriental in Atlanta (Ga, USA); and the dark dust of our beloved and feared volcano, incorporated in the pictorial matter, has reached, disguised in Modica's paintings, the residences of famous American actors.

Taught by prestigious masters such as Alberto Abate, Antonio Santacroce and Francesco Scialfa, Fabio Modica is by all means a worthy representative and performer of an excellent Catanian school of painting. His artistic career has evolved from figuration to semi-abstraction following his encounter with Santacroce. The main theme of Fabio Modica's artworks is the human being, notably its faces and eyes repeatedly painted as crystal blue and revealing the intimacy of the soul. Eyes custodian of truth, eyes seeking the truth, eyes that question, talk, scrutinise. The viewer is struck by the versatility of the artist as he draws, echoing Van Gogh, upon a wide and diverse range of bright colors.

Fabio Modica strongly believes that Art is the most effective means to enhance self-awareness. His "portraits" shape fragments of memories, enigmatic moods and modernist "moments of being", and are included in two parallel series titled "Gnosis" and "Prisoners of Matter", both widely acclaimed in the US galleries. The term "Gnosis", Greek in origin, means "knowledge", but not so much theoretical as embedded in action and experience. The Gnosis series captures individuals experiencing a state of epiphany and self-revelation which suddenly arouses a truly eye-opening emotion. The feelings explored are, inter alia: wonder, oblivion, eagerness, elevation, regret, self-denial, loss, composure, fear, dismay and liberation. In the Prisoners of Matter series the subjects are constrained within the material world, symbolized by the painting "matter". Modica skillfully catches the brief instant in which a kind of illumination, which film director Werner Herzog calls "the ecstatic flash, from which Truth emerges", breaks his subjects free from their self-made traps and barriers, so they can awake into a higher level of consciousness.

At present, in the United States, Modica is being represented by the "Bill Lowe Gallery" in Atlanta; the “Sorelle Gallery”, both in New Canaan (Connecticut) and in Albany (New York); and the “Aberson Exhibits” in Tulsa, Oklahoma. From April 2016 onwards, Fabio Modica will also be represented at many prestigious art fairs in the States by the "Bender Gallery" in North Carolina.