Artist statement

As a painter, I express myself through a gestural language that sensitively reflects itself on the canvas. Therefore, a kind of intimacy is developed within the creation of displacements or absences, cut-offs as well as emptiness. Vivid tonalities that capture my gestures flow into my paintings as discrete yet powerful reminders of human conditions, such as joy or tragedy. My visual compositions build on multicoloured traces done with diversity of materials. Each touch comes alive under constant bright light while the pieces of paper and fabric shift and bend, allowing the trace to constantly appear and disappear in the eyes of the viewer. My colour attributions smoothly shape volumes just like in a game that questions chance and intention that are in search of the possibilities of a poetic narrative. This is a process in which the imbalance is added to the rhythm that is at once instinctive and mastered. The cut-offs, the assembly of supports, and the pictorial gesture all together resonate the seduction and charm of a return to symbolism, abstract forms and precarious stability. Abstract paintings of the 60s such as Italian metaphysics and European expressionism with its delicate thought processes embodying colours are among my sources of inspiration.

Biography

Gennaro Scarpetta was born in Salerno (Italy) in 1979. He graduated in painting from the Naples Academy of Fine Arts and in drawing from the Brussels Academy of Fine Arts (Arba-Esa). His first exhibitions were held in Salerno, Naples and Rome. His art subsequently took him to France, Poland, Germany and Switzerland. He currently lives and works in Belgium, where he also teaches art at a secondary school in Brussels.