Presence Painting

Salvatore Sferrazza was born in Caltanissetta, Italy, in 1964.In his pictures he uses traditional painting techniques, such as oil on canvas and crayons.Salvatore Sferrazzas paintings have an inward strength. Not in the sense - often overused - of the work of art which reveals inner moods, or which is pervaded with the artists personal experience: it is a given that artists express themselves through their art.The situation is more complicated, and the three new works showed in this exhibition are an example of this. They are a new occasion of exploring Sferrazzas visual sensibility; coherently with his continue research in tones, colours and atmospheres. His oils on canvas are a successions of superimpositions of long-thought, revised and modified layers. Every painting is an intense experience, the result of a constant meditation on technique and subject matter.This begets a figurative style pervaded by mysterious fade-outs indicative of this experience and inquisitive of mans condition. This happens through an allusion to an inner dimension which opens up to the viewer own self. The artists eye sharply and yet respectfully reads faces, avoiding any sentimentality. The painted subjects speak with pure poetry which never becomes overtly realistic. This is a style of painting which hides to show. It doesnt force you to listen, but allows to let itself be heard.Sferrazzas latest works show homeless people as they stroll or stand still, with their eyes at times closed or unfocused, at times fixed on the viewers. They share the space of the streets, bridges and shop windows, and their presence makes them pungently human. It seems that this space which encloses and dominates these characters is there only for them; and that they have decided to show us a snap-shot of their life and of their way of seeing the world. Oil and lead pencil, even so diffuse, do not overcome the power of their faces, and the sophisticated techniques of painting are never disjointed from its subjects.On the contrary, this style truly captures its subjects, and the veil, which builds and joins things together, is perforated by presences whose thoughts we cannot avoid to interrogate, feeling at time too confused to understand them.Chiara Benazzani