Domenico Canino (1986) - The Sleeper

Synthetic enamel painting on canvas

Canino investigates the pictorial space in search of figures that tear 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 recombine into something else.
...the figures of Canino seem to disappear into the void, they liquefy and flow in a vital stream that gives rise to numerous other forms...

“that exhausts like an hemorrhage, that bare until the aspect that assumes its own nudity which exposes its own exposure” vulnerability and dolenza, in Canino’s painting it is as if they emerged 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 portrayals of bodies that in Canino’s line are presented in a vision that feels stripped. Torn and at the same time regenerated. Also due to the particular reddish ink that the artist has experimented with and uses, a blood-oxidized tonalities, and the gloss obtained from the 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 alterity. “One must dispel the idea that knowing equals taking possession of the being until reducing it to nothing, thereby neutralizing its constitutive alterity. [...] it is only an attempt to reduce the distance between self and Other to guarantee the self-sufficiency of the Same, its identification.”

''...layer after layer (diversity) the painter comes to compose a single body, a mass, a subject. The representation thus of the whole enclosed within the I....''

Signed by hand both on the stretch and on 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 Sila Piccola, where he began his first artistic studies immediately incorporating 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, handling scenographies and visual installations of performances, mixing artistic language with scenographic techniques.
Since 2009 he has continued his research in Sound Art and in the field of video images, without abandoning painting. His works are project-based. Through action, painting and electronic arts, he develops artistic experiments and research whose guiding theme 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, opposed to the conscious will of contemporary civilization. And the cult of the unconscious, the 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 tear through the canvas to cross the dichotomy between life and death, sleep and wakefulness, light and shadow.
The Arte/Life binomial, time, nature, space, and animal are recurring aspects also in his visual/audio 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 as “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 video works “Internal Videoportrait” and “Here,” and the surrealistic photo series “Pages from Life book.”
From 2011 he has worked, using synthetic enamels, on long 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, he seeks to define and assert his painting style and his visual language.
He currently lives and works in Bologna and collaborates with the Istituto Giambattista Vico, serving as a teacher in Figurative Arts, multimedia design and Art History.

Instagram. @domenico.canino.official