Cinematic Flag Painting

“Fresh, free, healthy.” This is how Stefano Francis Spelar, born in 1980, an Italian-American who obtained his BLA in France and looks at life with the eyes of Rome, defines his painting. A strongly gestural painting that rides on matter, with canvases that entangle the joys of color and objects into canvas; objects are subtracted from their everyday connotation to be placed in the artist's domain. Pebbles, pencils, sacks, brushes, toy cars and even combs and hairdresser's rolls, harnessed in laces of pigment: nothing escapes this pastiche of irony. Elements that, crystallized in a new dimension, intertwine with each other and sometimes mingle with writings and graffiti, giving life to new meanings and revisiting experience, individual and collective. Stefano is an artist: he writes poetry, plays music, paints, acts and has worked in film. Born and raised in Rome and matured in France with a Bachelor in Liberal Arts at the American University of Paris, he knows the técne and its history inside out. He reveals himself to be subtly and purposely citationist out of affinity, admiration and cerebral attunement with the Masters, not out of sterile emulation. He is surrealistically vagabond like Dali. He loves the objet trouvé like Duchamp. He paints “loudly” on a canvas comfortably lying on the ground like Pollock, - Spelar confesses he - “kill(s) gravity and enjoys the work in its becoming, as before a set table one will dine.” Canvases with scattered red, silver and black, with sometimes a “docile and gentle” flicker of Naples yellow, charged with eclectic expressiveness and contrasting chromatic and sign-like contrasts.Spelar works on pigment, on its very nature, on the fascinating synergy with which the elements interact with each other: preparations and glues, solvents and paints.Technical expertise goes hand in hand with virtuosity.It is in this way that all the energy of different experiences, from theater to music to poetry, as well as the most epidermal sufferings and sensations, slip onto the pictorial surface finding a specific material channeling beyond any temporal coordinates. His oils show the mastery that long time from now will se him mentioned with the masters of the past. - Geraldina Polverelli