Andrea Capanna
Urban Human
by Gianluca Marziani
Roman walls...crumbled, worn-out, overlaid, carved, marked, tagged, perforated, colored, drawn, scraped, deteriorated, molding, blackened...walls that are alive and pulsate like solid and sponge-like lungs, catalysts of human passages in the course of centuries, logbooks that memorize hybrid traces of capital and minor history...
Rome seeps memory from its eradicated walls, from the buildings' walls, facades and ruins, from external plaster and the basements, from stones and bricks, of imperial yellow to Pompeian red, from dark alleys to bright arteries...the city encompasses on its walls the long chain of events overlapping or juxtaposed, the progressive flux of time and the conservational awareness of space, the beauty with its fortunate contradictions, the absurd and its opposite extreme...
talking, dreaming, detonating, stimulating, attractive, overturning walls...
Andrea Capanna lives and works in Rome. And it couldn't be otherwise, one painting will be enough to understand the origins and the deep-rooted attitude, which is biologically and archeologically Roman. A belonging yet without rhetoric, in which Rome is not only a subject theme, where the gaze reasons within the metaphysics of ruin with its incessant metabolism. It's a pictorial journey which "uses" Rome to write its own history (the artist with his own personal visions) through the offshoots of great History (the Capital with all its imperial burden). Capanna elaborates a present with his personal interior resemblance, ideally molded on the planimetry of the forums, on the perimeters of the stone, along the surfaces of iconographic worship. what he represents is an anomalous present which pulls back towards an ideal origin of the wall, towards the very beginning that caresses the initial stroke, the origin of the urban genius, the source of the code that connects images on the horizontal line of a very long history
The walls influence the gaze, creating silent roots and implicit references, evoking belongings and affinities, connections and distortions. They are walls that encompass glimpses and panoramic views, that blend with churches and buildings, that surround the line of vision and define the eye's anthropological imprint. Capanna's pictorial history is a perfect example of this, the perfect case study, the adherent choice: paintings that show its archaic arteries, its petrified blood, its metabolic energy. the painting inhales and exhales back and forth between memory and premonition citation and interpretation. The artwork as a living organism, rooted to the cement's grey, a hybrid between solid and gas, evidence and revelation. Changing the purpose of cement is the mantra that hangs over a material with adaptable uses: essentially, function moves towards pure subtraction, where removing means increasing the meaning, defining the meaning, inventing the meaning. Technique becomes revelation, an aerobic mantra that reveals seismic perspectives, telluric partings, epidemic details. Capanna's paintings confirm roots' ineluctable value, their biochemical necessity, the symbolic and philosophical significance that a memory carries; at the same time, the painting dialogues freely with its roots, and a balanced debate follows, cathartic and instinctive, fluid and yet obstinate and vibrant, a dialectic with fair or unusual means, amongst intuitive shots, conscious confirmations and reconsiderations. Memory does not encumber on the field, on the contrary it clears it of all which is superfluous, the ornate and excessive. Capanna's Rome recreates the abstract power of a city that strips itself and remains intact, pure and diverse like a fossil of absolute value.
Talking paintings, dreaming, detonating, stimulating, attracting, overturning...
Detracting instead of adding, stripping the plaster by a reverse process, made of eliminations and cleansings. where volume regains the shape of a bare skeleton, where action transforms in depiction, where the imagination chooses its elective image. The artist knows he has to free himself of the roman deadweight, from that burden of rhetoric that afflicts one when looking for a long time with the postcard aesthetic. Being in Rome without being in Rome: the substantial difference that divides the universal glances from the provincial ones, creating qualitative sounding board, zones of pure light, unforgettable apparitions. Subtraction is above everything a mental approach, a way of observing and metabolizing reality, an evolved digestion which separates the slag from the essence, the mundane virtuosity of genetic tissue. Capanna's artworks have a stony and bare appearance, in reality they are the essence of a presence, a sort of anomalous diary of a traveling archeologist, fossil pages to be browsed amongst indelible atmospheres.
On one hand the city, the architectures, the places...
On the other the people, the faces, the bodies...
Shreds of the historic city mingled with functional architecture, with metaphysical modernism, with industrial projects, with post-war infrastructures...Rome becomes a graffitied body, tattooed, blood-stained, tainted with the fatigue of time, with relentless expectations, with spasmodic rhythms that govern the city. " in the northest south of the world"...Rome like sun burnt skin, sacrificed by antagonistic and prolific age, by its magnetic environment, by an abusive and avid resistance...Capanna chews the city, mixing ingredients and flavors, in order to digest the bare necessity, subtracting clothes but not vital organs, accessories but not bones and muscles...
Faces, busts, gazes, imposing profiles...Capanna's bodies look like aerial planimetries, cities viewed from above, similar to archeological geographies in which life resembles cellular organisms viewed under a microscope. These faces are often in profile, as they are often seen in cameos and ancient coins, and reaffirm an aura and a necessary distance, maintaining so the memory in its phlegmatic and solemnly lazy habitat. Simple materials and muscular techniques give life to a suspended portrait, on the border between material rigidity and cerebral fluidity, in perfect accord with the artists' pictorial landscapes. The face as the human counterpart of the urban landscape...
Rome reappears while disappearing...the painting's breathing speaks of forward and backward movement, memory and future along time's suspended red line, a liquid yet compact density, a contradiction resolved through subtraction. Andrea Capanna gives us a known Rome yet different from the usual, aligned with reality's plane but without mirroring reality. his city is an interior challenge, a Moloch from which one can't free oneself, a magnificent obsession that asks for patience and complicity, along a relationship of love and hate, amongst embraces and punches, caresses and excesses, normality and sublime ecstasy...