Galeria La Factoria del Perro Verde - Madrid

PRESS RELEASE

GIACOMO PICCA : "geogr=afias"

7 February - 7 March 2002

Giacomo Picca's work presents an intriguing and playful response to debates in contemporary painting, treading the ground between painting as a space of fiction and the materiality of its objecthood.This is the first time that the work of this London based artist will be presented to a Spanish audience.

Each piece of work focuses our attention onto the various procedures employed in their meticulous construction. By occupying a number of cultural positions, Picca may approach painting from the plateaus of High Modernism to the domestic processes of DIY, blurring the methodologies and decision making involved in both practices by hybridising the violence of the power tool with the sensual pleasure of paint.

With the absence of any centre to organise the developments of contemporary painting we are left with 'play', Picca's work exercises the constraints and freedoms of this condition, playing with a combination of precise juxtapositions. Importing the generic archetypes of landscape painting - tree, mountain, and horizon - with an index of painterly marks and formal strategies, the paintings continually operate on the margins of abstraction, design and decoration, while never straying too far from the empirical limits of the object. Picca's work allows us to inhabit a complex exchange of spatial locations, we may dream off into the distance of some impossible sense of place, while registering our immediate experience before the properties of scale, colour and physical 'presence'.

Giacomo Picca was born in Brazil and studied Engineering at the Sao Paulo Institute before moving to London to study Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art & Design, Wimbledon School of Art and finally completing his MA at Goldsmiths College in 2000. Picca has exhibited widely throughout the UK and has been included in several high profile shows including 'Assembly' and the London Biennale. A forthcoming solo show will be taking place in London at the 32 Gallery in January 2003.

( James Bohm - artist and writer)