Camillo Gannelli - Profilo di donna

The work is a manifesto of erotic essentiality.

The canvas has a chromatic field of force dominated by a deep, earthy, almost material red. It is not a flat red; it is a lived red: scratched, layered, with impasti that trap the light. A red-body.

At the center of this controlled blaze, a figure appears. Or rather, the idea of a figure. Two white lines, continuous, nerve-like and at the same time of a calligraphic grace, draw in negative a silhouette of a woman seen in profile. Breast, belly, hip, thigh: everything is said with three gestures. It is a drawing that recalls Matisse’s lesson in his period of maximum synthesis, but also the unique, uninterrupted sign of Picasso and Cocteau. I do not paint the body, I evoke its absence, like a chalk ghost on a flaked wall.

Merits attention the tactile construction. The surface is thick, rough, almost mural. The vertical edges of the canvas are treated like archaic frames: on the left a bituminous black carved with gold and silver, on the right a deep ultramarine blue and a burnt brown with ochre and cobalt blue drips. They are theatrical backdrops, columns of a modern temple that imprison and at the same time consecrate the central figure. The light, in the installation, cuts across the canvas, highlighting this very materiality.

There is a beautiful tension in this work: between the oppressive, carnally, almost violently warm background and the ethereal, almost spiritual coldness of the white sign. It is Eros and Thanatos. It is passion as a space in which the body dissolves and leaves only a trace.

The artist chooses the harder path: to say everything not by adding, but by subtracting. In an age of saturated and shouted images, this painting whispers. And precisely for this it remains impressed. It is not a nude to look at, it is a nude to remember.

An artwork of mature synthesis, where the abstract and the figurative cease to quarrel and find a sensual accord.

The signature at the bottom, white, discreet – Gannelli 2014 – does not disturb. It sits like a final graffiti.