Out of Focus: Raffaele Minotto

After the inauguration of the new space in Salerno, SimonBart Gallery presents a solo exhibition by Raffaele Minotto, Italian painter from Padua. The works in exhibition illustrate different themes, painted by the artist with his own particular painting technique. Interiors, landscapes, banquets, bathers, realized with a skilful use of the matter, which gives to the image the power to hit, "impress" the observer's mind through the eyesight.

 

The state of being contemporary, with its cult of the media and visual overexposure, daily reduces our ability to capture images in their primordial purity. The need to take the process of investigation of reality back through the painting is emblematic in the works of Minotto, which go beyond the most exterior dimension of the figures to investigate what is "behind the image”.

 

The artistic outcome of this research is a highly evocative painting, just "out of focus", that means both faded and elusive, in which the image gives itself gradually. Figures, often just reflected, to wait, chase, that spectator cannot completely possess, as the environments they stand in. Elegant interiors or rural landscapes painted by Minotto are memory spaces rather than physical ones: metaphysical places, trunk which preserve precious family memories or nature views to join with.

 

Minotto conveys the sacredness of the environment with a painting both material and evanescent, which gives back the idea of secretive, perhaps inaccessible places. Minotto’s visions seem suspended in a personal, dreamlike dimension, for example when he describes the grandmother’s dining room, treasure of family memories and, for this reason, always jealously locked, or the walks in places that recall memories of peace and carefree: places to preserve, moments that the artist wants to immortalize on canvas through his own language.

 

Particularly recurrent in the exhibited works is also the subject of the lavish feast, which certifies the interest of Minotto for Eat Art by Daniel Spoerri. Exactly like in Spoerri’s artworks, Minotto realizes random compositions of food dishes and left-overs projected toward the viewer. The detailed description suggests a family atmosphere, where the relationship between man and the objects of the most ordinary everyday life is explored. These are spaces and situations pervaded by a sense of nostalgia but also grace, which stay away from any spectacular fascination to go deep, as Alberto Agazzani states, "in the secret heart of reality and give it back with the magic of evocation, mystery, seduction".