Domenico Canino (1986) - Sleeper (portrait)

Synthetic enamel painting on canvas

Canino probes the pictorial space in search of figures that slice through 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 only to reassemble into something else.
...Canino’s figures seem to disappear into nothingness, they liquefy and flow in a vital stream that gives rise to numerous other forms...

“which exhausts itself like an hemorrhage, that strips down to the aspect that assumes its own nudity that exposes the very exposure itself” 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 left by their blending confer dimension and energy to the figuration of bodies that, in Canino’s stroke, are revealed in a vision that is scraped bare. Torn apart and yet regenerated. Also due to the particular reddish tint that the artist has experimented with and uses, a rust-red blood tone, and the gloss achieved by enamel that recalls the vivid vision of the muscle fibers that make up a body. A subcutaneous gaze, beyond the reassuring and homogeneous surface of identity, to reach the living flesh of otherness. “One must shove aside the idea that knowing equals seizing the being to reduce it to nothing, thereby neutralizing its constitutive otherness. [...] it is only an attempt to reduce the distance between oneself and the Other to guarantee the autosufficiency of the Same, its identification.”

''...layer after layer (the diversity) the painter arrives at composing a single body, a mass, a subject. Hence the representation of the whole enclosed within the I...''

Hand-signed both on the canvas frame and on the front

It will be shipped with a 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 Sila Piccola, where he began his first artistic studies immediately inserting the aesthetics of nature as the subject of his works.
For several 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 stage designs and visual installations of performances, mixing artistic language with scenic techniques.
Since 2009 he has pursued his research in the field of Sound Art and video imaging, without abandoning painting. His works are inherently projective. Through action, painting, and electronic arts, he develops experimental artistic research whose guiding soul is the concept of “existence” and its sacredness.
Canino’s art is a primordial call to the unity of Life, understood as an organic whole but never harmonious, opposed to 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 anti-heroes break the cages of time and space imposed by mechanized society. They slash the canvas to transcend the dichotomy between life and death, sleep and wakefulness, light and shadow.
The art/Life binomial, time, nature, space, the animal, are recurring aspects even in his visual/sound compositions, often developed in natural spaces and then installed in exhibition spaces, such as “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). Also in 2010 he continued with multimedia language and techniques to create the video works “Internal Videoportrait” and “Here,” and the surreal photographic series “Pages from Life book.”
Since 2011 he has worked, using synthetic enamels, on long painting series such as “Space, Energy, Masses,” “The Past, the Present, and the Future of the Human Condition,” “Hypernature,” and “You, me and the others,” with the latter seeking to define and affirm his painting style and visual language.
He currently lives and works in Bologna and collaborates with the Giambattista Vico Institute, serving as a lecturer in Figurative Arts, Multimedia Design, and Art History.

Instagram. @domenico.canino.official