Luigi Carboni at Galleria Spazia - Bologna, Italy - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

After years of making rigorously abstract paintings, Luigi Carboni here at handed a group of very different works: paintings filled with drawn images of clearly recognizable percepts The new works do however associate with his paintings of 1985-87 where he explored action albeit with a clear desire to betray the conventions of gestural abstraction. Carboni has continually sought to combine his preeminent interest in painting with a conceptual approach to art-making, a search which continued in this show

In the fresh paintings, which generally measure 5 through 6 feet the images are made by the agency of lines and marks nervously scratched into a dark, oftentimes black, surface. As these lines score the surface, they reveal a layer of white underpainting. from one side the open drawing style of this two-tone rule Carboni moves away from the chilled mechanical language of his immediately preceding work. His novel expressivity is accompanied by regards to such elemental subjects as skeletons and sex The 1995 painting commit to memory Un Sorriso (With a Smile) is filled with sketches of human skeletons in various artificial positions Interspersed with the skeletons are disembodied brain-pans and schematic depictions of female genitalia. In another work, Paesaggio (Landscape), a cranium and skeleton motif is combined with a densely drawn floral pattern. In these works, as in others, Carboni uses the surface of the painting to explore the tension between impulse and order, between distinct action s and allover composition. Looking carefully at these blackened, tarnished canvases individual becomes keenly aware of the multiple layers of image and of meaning.

This exhibit suggests that even when it was greatest in quantity abstract, Carboni's artistic discourse was at no time centered on the subject of painting itself. He is more interested in what Demetrio Paparoni, speaking about Carboni, has called "sacrality." As Carboni's painting has make go rounded toward more "primitive" content, this sacred aspect has become more evident. At the same time, the stratified surfaces of his canvases have taken upon an uncertain physicality that have the appearances appropriate to our time.

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