Fuga Verde: Alessandro Pessoli

In his third solo show at the Anton Kern Gallery, Italian artist Alessandro Pessoli departs from his well-established vocabulary of smallscale watercolor drawings. He breaks with familiarity of the paper in favor of large aluminum panes boldly painted with enamel, oil and spray paint. The exhibition, entitled Fuga Verde  (“Green Escape”), consists of twelve such panels.

Fuga Verde refers to the title of a painting that depicts a rather tense scene of a woman and her infant child on a donkey flanked by two warrior figures. Pessoli applies the paint in a fluid way covering the metal surface in thin glossy layers and thus making the colors radiate between hues of cold green and fleshy pink. He achieves an effect of luminosity not dissimilar from that of road signs or Technicolor film. Allusions to Catholicism or current historical-political events seem obvious. However, Pessoli elevates the scenes to a level worthy of Balzac's Comédie humaine representing human passion and frailty in all its varieties. Pessoli feeds the imagination with unexplained, comical, sinister, melancholy and sometimes even grotesque juxtapositions.