Stefano Trapanese (1963) - L'abito rosso - 2009

Stefano Trapanese is a LEADER ARTIST in the province of Salerno (Italy) and is consistently in the TOP10 of NATIONAL PROFILE MASTERS in Italy (source PitturiAmo.com).
A student of Italian art history and, in particular, of Neapolitan painting of the 17th century, Master Stefano Trapanese draws inspiration from the painter Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi) and from Italian Baroque painters. His paintings are all original oil on canvas works. He selects the models, outfits them, and places them in pose for a portrait.

"The crouched female figure in a red dress dominates the scene completely. Trapanese has used a strong diagonal that runs from the top-left corner toward the bare foot at the bottom-right: it guides the eye and gives dynamism to a pose that would otherwise be closed, introverted. The vertical 60x50 format is perfect because it amplifies the sense of contemplation. The choice to cut off part of the back and the fabric creates tension, as if we were spying on a private moment.
The red of the dress is the absolute protagonist. It is a deep vermilion, laid on with body, which alone carries all the emotional part of the painting. The Master has done notable work on the folds: you can read the heaviness of the fabric, the shadowed areas are warm, not black, and the highlights on the satin are not blasted white but kept in pinkish tones. This gives real volume.
The dark background, almost Caravaggesque, isolates the figure and makes the red explode by contrast. The taupe/brown grays of the sofa/bed are desaturated just enough: they support without competing. Beautiful the detail of the fuchsia enamel at the foot and of the decorated straps, small notes that humanize.
You can see the hand in oil. The flesh tones are modeled with delicate transitions: the shoulders and back have a warm, credible luminosity. The brushwork on the background and on the sofa fabric is broader, more textural, and creates a nice contrast with the almost smooth rendering of the skin and the dress. Anatomically the figure supports: the torso twist, the position of the arm that hides the face, the foot in perspective are difficult and you have solved them. The right hand that holds the fabric is delicate and well foreshortened.
It is a painting of silence. The woman does not reveal herself; she protects herself. It is not explicit sadness; it is more introspection, vulnerability, fatigue. The fact that the face is hidden forces the viewer to focus on the body and on the color to read the mood. Stylistically the painting sits in contemporary realism with echoes of figuration from the 1990s: very attentive to the data, but with a painterly application that does not become photographic hyperrealism."
(art criticism curated by art history professor Luigi Crescenzo)