Ugo Nespolo

Ugo Nespolo				Main Gallery, Gallery II			March 29 - April 23, 2008

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	Ugo Nespolo In this bold series of paintings Ugo Nespolo combines the image of the museum with the notion of Modernity in art. In the minds of many people, these two concepts are still opposed. The museum is a place that preserves art physically, and makes it available to large numbers of spectators. However, by exposing art in this way, it also runs the risk of freezing its development. We visit museums to be told what art is, and this act of telling implies a kind of stability – which is exactly what the spirit of the Modern is always against. Ever since museums of Modern Art, and, after that, Museums of Contemporary Art, began to play a major part in our cultural landscape, those who direct them have had to struggle with this paradox. How can an art that claims to be avant-garde be fitted into the intractable patterns of official administration and patronage – patterns that are in fact still very much like those that existed in the closing years of the 19th century? Nespolo’s solution to this problem is to make the museum, as a physical entity, the subject of a series of Modernist transformations. His references are to Robert Delaunay and Fernand Léger, and also, of course, to Umberto Boccioni, the most important of the Italian Futurists. Boccioni was interested in the dynamism of the city, and in the possibility of representing the passage of time. Delaunay had similar interests. And it was also Delaunay who said, in a letter written in 1912 to the German artist August Macke: “I say it is indispensable to look ahead of and behind oneself in the present. If there is such a thing as tradition, and I believe there is, it can only exist in the sense of the most profound movements of culture.” Nespolo’s canvases representing museums can be seen as a contemporary response to this view, with the institution as a mechanism that enables the spectator to look both forward and back. It is clear that an important factor in Nespolo’s approach to picture-making is his experience as a cinematographer. The bright house of his canvases and the way the color patches are related to one another force the eye to move across the paint surface in a way that resembles the tracking movement of a cine camera. That is to say, when you look at these paintings, you are engaged in making your own film. As everyone with experience of the cinema knows, one characteristic of cinematic ways of seeing, as opposed to the seeing we do independently, is the ability to ‘force’ points of view. You have to look as the camera looks – no alternative is possible. This should not be possible with a painting – normally we look at paintings in different ways, varying our distance and our angle of approach. Nespolo, however, is adept in making the spectator look in precisely the way he wants him or her to look. Like some of Delaunay’s work, and Boccioni’s too for that matter, his canvases approach the condition of purely optical art while nevertheless remaining figurative. This gives them a very special an individual quality – a distinctive ‘signature’ that is increasing rarer in painting today.