Giacomo Picca's work present an intriguing and playful response to debates in contemporary painting, treading the ground between painting as a space of fiction and the factuality of its own reality.
Continuing the artists' interest in landscape painting, the attention focuses onto the various procedures employed in the work's meticulous construction. In the new paintings, 'landscape' operates as an agent in search of 'idealism' in an over flooded world where images are easily manipulated to mediate reality. Landscape, as the rescuer agent, becomes the signifier that re / attempts to find those moments of transcendence in the very means for mediation of information, such as the internet, magazines and art books. The images were thus encountered by chance, and then re - done following the artists' language that blends DIY and painterly methodologies, hence 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. 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. As always in Picca's work, there is a cared and balanced composition creating a dialogue with the economy of means employed to make the work, each painting becoming rich in its simplicity.
Giacomo Picca, a Brazilian - born and London - based artist, studied Engineering at the São Paulo Institute of Engineering, 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, Spain and Germany. He had a solo show 'Geografias' in Madrid and 'Trees for the Wood' in London. Last year he curated the shows: 'draw_drawing_' and 'cosy universe_2004'. This year, he has been commissioned a Public Art Project by 'Arts Trail' to work in the area of North Kensington in London.
August Art - Baldwin Terrace (off wharf road), Islington, London N1
Opening times: Thur - Sat 12 - 6, Sun 12 - 3
Contact: Winnie Sze, 0207 608 1252
PRESS RELEASE
AUGUST ART
GIACOMO PICCA
7th April - 18th April 2005
Opening night Wednesday 6 April