Bologna, Luca Caccioni on display at OTTO Gallery with forty works... nocturnal

Eight years after his solo exhibition Dessins de chambre (et d’autres) (2015) and three years after the group show L’Ospite (2020), Luca Caccioni (Bologna, 1962) returns to the exhibition halls of OTTO Gallery in Bologna with the solo show Se è vero che la notte porta consiglio (If it is true that the night brings advice), presenting about forty new works that have aluminum as their support. These are nocturnal tales that the Bologna-based artist entrusts to his distilled and suspended painting, concentrated in small-format works, executed in the studio during the deepest hours of the night or at dawn.

The paintings, which seem to float within the exhibition rooms, echo with subtle echoes that suggest how the intimacy of painting is at the heart of this exhibition. The conceptual idea of control and erasure return as fundamental techniques in Caccioni’s practice, who, working by superimposition, constructs these evocative images with techniques of addition or subtraction of color. Witnessing the narrative of painting we then find another sign element, recurring in his practice: writing. Self-signifying phrases and words with a poetic character emerge in the works as memories to be revealed, similarly to the primordial and allusive forms created by painting.

The research into the meaning and possibilities of the sign - now as image, now as word - that defines the work of the Bolognese artist also brings him voluntarily close to the idea of sublimation: the verb “sublimate” is understood in the purest sense of the term, as something that elevates, that “directs toward a vanishing point in the infinite, to the indeterminate,” just like the works presented, suspended and with an almost magical intent. Like erasure, sublimating is an act that involves loss, relative internalization and elaboration, and finally the creation of something new that can be posed both as a solution and as a new point of questioning. In this we see again Caccioni’s use of ancient mediums such as oil painting and glazing, which are, however, completely reinvented by techniques such as erasure; or the use of unusual materials such as aluminum, a reactive surface employed as of 2019. Caccioni in this sense approaches the conceptual idea of sublimation by stripping himself of conventional canons, techniques, spaces and times to let himself be guided, in this case in the night, towards new languages and codes capable of reinventing the practice of painting in contemporaneity.

Luca Caccioni lives and works in Bologna, where he holds the Chair of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts. His work is in the collections of important public and private institutions, including MAMbo in Bologna, the Galleria Civica in Modena, the CARISBO Foundation in Bologna, the Unicredit Foundation, the BNL, the Permanente in Milan, the MAC in Lissone, the VAF-Stiftung Foundation in Frankfurt, and the Art.Plus Museum in Donaueschingen.

For all information, you can visit OTTO Gallery’s official website.

Pictured: Luca Caccioni, Threesome (2022; oil on aluminum, 30x21 cm).

Bologna, Luca Caccioni on display at OTTO Gallery with forty works... nocturnal

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