Domenico Canino (1986) - Sleeper (portrait)

Synthetic enamel painting on canvas

Canino investigates the painting space in search of figures that tear the canvas and surpass the dichotomy between life and death, sleep and wakefulness, and light and shadow.
A series of blurred, rarefied figures that dissolve into the void to recombine into something else.
...the figures of Canino seem to disappear into nothingness, they liquefy and flow in a vital flux that gives rise to numerous other forms...

“which exhausts like an hemorrhage, which undresses to the aspect that assumes its own nakedness that exposes its own exposure” vulnerability and sorrow, in Canino’s painting it is as if they emerge as states of nature. The use of synthetic enamels as a medium and the trace resulting from their blending give dimension and energy to the representations of bodies that in Canino’s brush take on a vision that is stripped down. Torn and yet regenerated. Also due to the particular reddish tint that the artist has experimented with and uses, a blood-oxidized tone, and the gloss achieved by the enamel that recalls the vivid vision of the muscle fibers that make up a body. An under-the-skin look, beyond the reassuring and homogeneous surface of identity, to reach the living flesh of otherness. “One must dispel the idea that knowing equals possessing being to the point of reducing it to nothing, thereby neutralizing its constitutive otherness. [...] it is only an attempt to reduce the distance between self and Other to ensure the self-sufficiency of the Same, its identification.”

''...layer after layer (the diversity) the painter arrives at composing a single body, mass, subject. hence the representation of the whole contained within the self...''

Signed by hand on both the canvas frame and the front

will be shipped with certificate of authenticity and owner header
hand-signed prints
recently produced engravings

Domenico Canino
Born in Catanzaro in 1986 and raised in Albi among the mountains of the Sila Piccola, where he began his initial artistic studies immediately incorporating the aesthetics of nature as the subject of his works.
For years he lived and worked in Rome where he earned a Scenography diploma at the Academy of Fine Arts with the project on auditory perception “Study on the vibration of the Iron.”
He collaborated with several Theater companies, curating scenographies and visual installations of performances, blending artistic language with scenic techniques.
Since 2009 he has continued his research in the field of Sound Art and video imagery, without abandoning painting. His works are project-based. Through action, painting and electronic arts, he develops artistic experiments and research whose guiding soul is the concept of “existence” and the sacredness of it.
Canino’s art is a primordial call to the uniqueness of Life, understood as an organic whole but never harmonious, contrasted with the will of consciousness of contemporary civilization. And the cult of the unconscious, of original thought, as a cyclical return to the origin of pure existence. Canino’s antiheroes break the cages of time and space imposed by a mechanized society. They tear the canvas to transcend the dichotomy between life and death, sleep and wakefulness, light and shadow.
The Art/Life binomial, time, nature, space, animal, are recurring aspects also in his visual/audio compositions, often developed in natural spaces and then installed in exhibition spaces, like “My sign and the Sign of the Earth,” a work developed over two years (2011-2012), or like “Pieces from the Sacred Tree,” “Blue Line in the Space,” “Ten Different Moments” (2010). Still in 2010 he continues with multimedia language and techniques to create video works “Internal Videoportrait” and “Here,” and the surrealist photo series “Pages from Life book.”
From 2011 he works, using synthetic enamels, on long-running painting series “Space, Energy, Masses,” “The Past, the Present, and the Future of the Human Condition,” “Hypernature” and “You, me and the others,” with the latter, aiming to define and assert his painting style and visual language.
He currently lives and works in Bologna and collaborates with the Institute Giambattista Vico, holding the role of lecturer in Figurative Arts, multimedia design and History of Art.

Instagram. @domenico.canino.official