The Red Glove Painting

Emanuele Druid Napolitano (1976, Rome, Italy) works with paintings, drawings, installations and films. By applying poetic and often metaphorical language, Napolitano seduces the viewer into a world of ongoing equilibrium and the interval that articulates the stream of daily events. Moments are depicted that only exist to punctuate the human drama in order to clarify our existence and to find poetic meaning in everyday life. By choosing mainly formal solutions, he creates work through labour-intensive processes which can be seen explicitly as a personal exorcism ritual. They are inspired by a nineteenth-century tradition of works, in which an ideal of ‘Fulfilled Absence’ was seen as the pinnacle. His paintings appear as dreamlike images in which fiction and reality meet, well-known tropes merge, meanings shift, and past and present fuse. Time and memory always play a key role. By referencing romanticism, humour and symbolism, he touches on various overlapping themes and strategies. Several reoccurring subject matter can be recognised, such as the relation with popular culture, situations and myths of the past, echoes of Jean Cocteau, Henri Matisse and Paul Gauguin as well as David Hockney. Druid’s works are based on formal associations which open a unique poetic vein. Multilayered images arise in which the fragility and instability of our seemingly certain reality are questioned.