Focus on the sea for Giuseppe Modica

From April 22nd to September 15th Giuseppe Modica returns to exhibit with a large solo show at Hendrik Christian Andersen Museum. Three years ago it was the turn of the exhibition «Atelier»centered on the theme of the place of elaboration of the painting, this time the focus is on sea ​​surrounding Italy: «Mediterranean routes – circular vision» is the title under which the artist has brought together around twenty canvases from recent years, almost all unpublished. The cure is of Maria Giuseppina di Montedirector of the museum, e Gabriele Simongini.

The primary subjects are, as always for the painter born in 1953 in Mazzaro del Vallo (who moved to Rome in 1986), the sea, the light, the space, the silence. Even in this last cycle of jobs, one meridian and metaphysical light, absolutely “Sicilian”but also memorial (it is the light of childhood memories), floods, silent, motionless sea views and blue environments open onto infinity, between peeling walls, windows and doors overlooking the sky, ladders, cubes of Dürer and other enigmatic polyhedrons, paintings within a painting and large mirrors, capable of multiplying the gaze and reflections. Novelty it’s warships which now appear on the horizon, small signs of our times, which disturb the soul, without disturbing the overall enchantment. The references are to the meandering climate of war, but also to the tragic shipwrecks of desperate people.

Gabriele Simongini writes in the catalogue: «Modica even manages, in some of the most significant works on display, to magnificently condense in suspended but intense images the tragedy that transformed the Romans’ “Mare Nostrum” into “Mare Monstrum”, a gigantic open-air cemetery». However, the triumph triumphs over everything blue, absolute color for Modica and quintessence that unifies air, water and solids. The painter explains: «It is the color of atmosphere and distance (…) it is also the color of spirituality and contemplation. And then with blue all the other colors light up, such as reds and ochres which are the vital energy of light. Blue is a necessary counterpoint to light. It is the color of breath, of freedom and of the vastness of the firmament». Maria Giuseppina Di Monte says: «Modica works with light and air: the first creates the color and the second envelops its forms. Two more factors must be taken into account: geometry and perspective, indispensable foundations of painting».

In fact, his parents had an influence on the artist’s mental formation historical-artistic myths: Piero della Francesca, Antonello da Messina, Georges Seurat, Giorgio de Chiricoin addition to the consonance with painters such as Guccione And Sarnari, frequented in Sicily. But also the literature played an important role, and writers, alongside numerous art critics, are many of the main exegetes of Modica painting, from Sciascia to Agamben, Tabucchi, Sweet, Calasso And Cesare Vivaldi. What attracts everyone is always the meaning of the enigmaof mystery, affirmed in full light.