Arte Fiera 2020 focus 1/3: Eduardo Secci, the painting of Chris Hood and Pierre Knop

We begin with the Eduardo Secci gallery in our three focuses on the exhibitors of the 2020 edition of Arte Fiera, the 44th of Italy’s longest-running modern and contemporary art fair. We begin with Secci, as his booth seemed to us to be among the most interesting in the brand new Pittura XXI section, which makes its debut at the fair this year to propose the best of contemporary painting: an initiative that has no equal even in foreign fairs, so it was only right to devote much attention to it (as we have already done for our “top ten”). In the Windows on Art ranking, Eduardo Secci earned our special mention for the good quality of his proposal.

Introducing the two artists to us at the fair is young Ruben Tanzi, from Eduardo Secci’s staff: the works hanging on the walls of the booth are those of American Chris Hood (Atlanta, 1984) and Pierre Knop (Nancy, 1982). “We brought two young artists to Bologna, one thirty-six and the other thirty-eight years old,” Tanzi explained, “because we wanted to propose something innovative to the Arte Fiera audience by presenting the works of two artists who have been on the scene for a short time, and who are not well known in Italy.”

And indeed their works have recently arrived in Italy. Hood has been all over the United States: from his Atlanta home he moved first to New York and then to California, where he has continued to paint while also photographing and teaching. Photography is an important medium for Hood: his paintings often start from photographic images, which in his mind then add up to memories of art history, fragments coming in from the mass media, and ultimately from a set of stimuli that the painter reworks with his strong and vigorous style to communicate to the viewer a kind of uncertainty, that of the times in which we live. Looking at his paintings we sense that there are images, with elements that are clearly distinguishable and others that cannot be deciphered, and consequently we do not quite understand what is represented there: this indeterminacy is one of the key elements of his style.

Chris Hood blends together traditional techniques, cues from digital languages, images from American counterculture, and a keen interest in psychophysics. He has previously exhibited in London, Los Angeles, Milan, Paris, San Franciesco, and Turin.

Chris Hood, Cosmic sausage (2020; alkyd on canvas, 200 x 150 cm)

Chris Hood, Liquid night (2000; alkyd on canvas, 165 x 140 cm)

Knop took up painting having realized that school was not for him: he then enrolled at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf and developed his own style that blends suggestions from his home country (think of the works of the Expressionists) with solicitations that conversely come from overseas. His art, moreover, has undergone very sharp changes in recent times: having started from an abstractionism rooted in Abstract Expressionism, he then turned to a strongly figurative art that speaks of multiculturalism, globalization, and individual tensions. With strongly elongated characters, acid colors, scenes that seem to derive almost from lysergic visions: an approach similar to that of the more experienced Genoese artist Roberto Chiabrera (Genoa, 1970), also a visionary artist with similar cultural matrices (although with a more mature artistic path and a more tormented past), to whom Knop can be compared.

A very meticulous artist, capable of locking himself in the studio for entire days at a time, he usually starts work at 6:30 in the morning, spending several times in meditation, and even working on several paintings at once. Knop has solo and group exhibitions to his credit in Düsseldorf, New York, Cologne, Naples, and Los Angeles.

Pierre Knop, Forest (2019; oil, pencil, and ink on canvas, 190 x 160 cm)

Pierre Knop, Beat Figure 5 (2019; ink, pencil, acrylic, and oil on canvas, 80 x 110 cm)

Pierre Knop, Beat Figure 1 (2019; ink, pencil, acrylic, and oil on canvas, 140 x 120 cm)

“Between Hood and Knop,” Tanzi explains, “there is a strong dialogue. On Hood’s side, the message is much more subliminal and arrives with techniques reminiscent of those in advertising, while in Knop there is a stronger critique of society, which, according to the artist, distances human beings from their natural state.” In Bologna, there are the two artists’ most recent works. On the one hand, Hood’s vigorous canvases, with their colorful chaos, their uncertainty, their very pronounced mark-making, their tendency to interfere with our perception, but with a drafting that still remains light, despite appearances. On the other are the works in the Beat figures series, an exploration of the boundaries of figurative painting, with characters moving between them until they dissolve following a tight rhythm that gives the series its title, in a continuous process of construction and deconstruction.

“Expectations for the exhibition are positive,” Tanzi concludes at the end of our chat. “We are aware that we have brought two wonderful artists to the exhibition.” And indeed, the almost unanimous appreciation the Florentine gallery received at Arte Fiera proved them right.

Pictured below: Pierre Knop, The invention of fire (2019; oil on canvas, 145 x 170 cm).

Arte Fiera 2020 focus 1/3: Eduardo Secci, the painting of Chris Hood and Pierre Knop

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