Intimate spontaneity, shimmering reflections of hidden sensations. Visceral emotions in cloud shapes. Sinuous, iridescent, ligamentous to the flow of real thoughts. Human presence hovers and clouds questioning glances. Mediated experiences on pictorial fields, aesthetic dramaturgy of a pure and raw reality.

Claudio Coltorti, “Bacio a Volo a Santa Chiara”, 2024, oil on canvas, diptych 40.5 x 30.5 cm (each), courtesy of the gallery and the artist, © Danilo Donzelli Photography

It is an art of encounter, a symbiotic art that of Claudio Coltorti – Neapolitan painter born in 1989 – an art of the inside and the outside, of the detail and the whole, an art of the I and the you as systems of life. Life and death, nature and artifice, saturation and emptying. Like a passing cloud, painting is cloudy with vibrations, ready to fall copiously onto the fertile soil of existence. The representation of the figure is an illusory definition: the repetition of elements is formality, differentiation of perspectives and proportions. The softness of the lines contrasts with the immensity of the hands and intuitable faces, creating a mirror-like symphony. For Coltorti, painting is a personal interpretation of reality, an absence of canons and pure voluptuousness. To go free without second thoughts or underlying structures, to feel the porous flesh of the canvas absorbing colours sensitive to the soul, is a platonic flirtation, elective and selective. Do ut des, balancing between animate and inanimate, between essence and transcendence.

Claudio Coltorti, “Corpo Libero”, 2024, oil on canvas, 100 x 70 cm, courtesy of the gallery and the artist, © Danilo Donzelli Photography

Nevertheless, the colour palette goes beyond this aesthetic boudoir. Shades of orange are the artist’s favourite sign, and each gradation leads into new sensual planes. The colour is spread in veils, which in their subtlety seem full, and are contrastingly mixed with greens, purples and blues, reminiscent of Mark Rothk’s abstract backgrounds. Each portion of colour stands out despite the absence of contour lines of the figures that dictate the gaze. The continuous subtraction of pictorial elements renders the fatness of the oil colour of an almost vaporous consistency. There is a balance in Claudio Coltorti’s work that makes the experience itself gradate, rethinking everyday life between sweetness and sensuality, bitterness and precariousness, in a continuous dialogue.

Claudio Coltorti, “Statti bene!”, 2024, oil on canvas, 55 x 46 cm, courtesy of the gallery and the artist, © Danilo Donzelli Photography

The Neapolitan artist returns to his home town for his third solo exhibition at Galleria Acappella entitled TERZA SERIE, accompanied by a masterly text by Fabrizio Maria Spinelli. With a small number of oils on canvas – eight to be precise, between small and large format – Coltorti exhibits the latest act of a never-ending quest. After the previous exhibitions Tele and Dialogo, like characters in a film trilogy, the works appear mature in their freshness, opaque in their lustre. The liminal concept between abstraction and figuration is subverted as the achievement of pure interpretation, without suggestion or suggestion. As in the case of Corpo Libero (Free Body), in which the intuition of hands let seemingly amorphous forms fall prey to it. This work title is a leitmotif in the exhibited works, a canonical untying that uninhibits the brush and lets colour prevail.

Claudio Coltorti, “Terza serie”, installation view, 2024, (“Fumo Industriale”, oil on canvas, 100 x 70 cm, 2024 / “Donna Nuvola sta scavando”, oil on canvas 100 x 70 cm, 2024), courtesy of the gallery and the artist, © Danilo Donzelli Photography

Claudio Coltorti’s painting is vivid, transfigured, emotional. The soft tension of saturated colours represents and imagines emotional and non-rational realities. He empathises with the canvas through an elective affinity towards the other.

Info:

Claudio Coltorti: Terza Serie
20/01 – 05/03 2024
Galleria ACAPPELLA
Vico S. M. A Cappella Vecchia 8/A, Napoli
www.museoapparente.eu

Massimiliano Bastardo

Art Curator and Art Advisor, graduated in Visual Arts and Cultural Mediation, with Master in Curatorial Practices, born in 1995, lives in Naples. He collaborates with Galleries and Independent Spaces, his research is mainly focused on Emerging Painting, with a careful and inclined gaze also on other forms of aesthetic language.