Imagine travelling on a train, sitting by the window and looking out at a rainy day.
The core of my work is somewhere within that experience. I think of my artistic research as a jigsaw made up of every piece of my upbringing; the first art I saw in the home I grew up in, from tribal maskson the walls to Arte Povera pieces dotted around the house, my secondary school architecture education, growing passionate about graphic design and enthusiastic about the style of Bauhaus and feeling like an observer looking out at other people’s lives.The thought behind the stylistic construction of my works is to merge the different layers existingin a scenario of my choosing as if I were to melt them one into the other in a sort of movement. This idea came about from the need to create a flow between human subjects on a physical level as much as on the emotional one.
I think the link that ties together the spirit of my subjects is the look. It’s in the eyes that we find the connection that relates them all to one another. At the start of my journey I was dead set on wanting to convey the image of two lovers as a single being that would somehow keep two separate, individual personalities. Two souls generating a unique third one. This is how my research began. As my work evolved, I developed a satirical/ironic twist in telling the story of my chosen subjects. When I look at people around me I feel both emotionless and at the same time moved by some familiar feeling of intimacy that brings me to become extremely fond of them while I stilllook to find elements of social criticism in their existence. My subjects’ expressions are inherently troubled and anxious. I can’t help but think that this comes naturally from the emotional burden that we all carry in having to fit society’s labels despite our personal identity that we end up repressing. Rain is the main symbol of how humans can even manipulate the shape of elemental forces. This is the only element that I draw freehand so that I can tailor its course around the architecture in my works.
Most of the time it ends up “boxed” in illogic square compartments, actually.Natural is not quite what I’m going for with my work and that’s why I’ve never felt the need to communicate through colour. I’m not interested in conveying emotions in that way, I’m interested in shape and structure. More precisely, I always start with a 5x5mm grid being still very much devoted to my school notebooks - and I create images with false axonometric projections, breaking the rules of perspective by merging shapes without following a proper set of rules, except using almost exclusively 45° and 90° angles. Planning is a perpetual creating, erasing, joining the dots and recreating to then play with opticalillusions through black backgrounds. In conclusion, my work philosophy gravitates towards the idea of contemplating an intricate but quite amusing society that despite its rigid structure fails to maintain order because of the influence of the confused and chaotic people that it’s made of. People who are nevertheless forced into the apparent harmony of the world they have created for themselves.
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