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拍品專文
Rendered in thick, viscous layers of impasto that protrude from the canvas in three dimensions, San Damiano exemplifies Jeni Spota’s fascination with religious imagery and Italian Renaissance art.
Raised on Long Island, she graduated from the School at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007, and quickly rose to critical acclaim. Riddled with allusion to biblical themes – the lift of Christ, Adam and Eve, the Virgin Mary – Spota’s practice took flight after painting a scene from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1971 film. Il Decameron. ‘There's one particular moment where Giotto, who's played by Pasolini, wakes up in the middle of the night with a vision of a painting he wants to make’, she recalls. ‘It's of all these people on a hill and the Virgin Mary and choirboys and underneath them, naked mannequin figures hanging and angels holding out a cross and people praying, and a boy holding up a miniature church. In the film it only lasted for a few seconds. I really wanted that image to stay in my head. It felt like a dream, so fleeting, but you really felt the energy of it. It encapsulated everything I was trying to find and say and think about’. Her near-sculptural painterly surfaces – reminiscent of Frank Auerbach – arose in response to this feeling. ‘I really liked how the thick paint made the dream more dreamlike’, she says, ‘how the paint vibrated and created that feeling of the dream, because you can't really focus on it when it's thick and textured like that. You get the general idea of the image and then as soon as you look away, you can't really construct the entire image in your head the way it is in the painting, but you get the feeling of the painting, the ethereal energy from it.’
Raised on Long Island, she graduated from the School at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007, and quickly rose to critical acclaim. Riddled with allusion to biblical themes – the lift of Christ, Adam and Eve, the Virgin Mary – Spota’s practice took flight after painting a scene from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1971 film. Il Decameron. ‘There's one particular moment where Giotto, who's played by Pasolini, wakes up in the middle of the night with a vision of a painting he wants to make’, she recalls. ‘It's of all these people on a hill and the Virgin Mary and choirboys and underneath them, naked mannequin figures hanging and angels holding out a cross and people praying, and a boy holding up a miniature church. In the film it only lasted for a few seconds. I really wanted that image to stay in my head. It felt like a dream, so fleeting, but you really felt the energy of it. It encapsulated everything I was trying to find and say and think about’. Her near-sculptural painterly surfaces – reminiscent of Frank Auerbach – arose in response to this feeling. ‘I really liked how the thick paint made the dream more dreamlike’, she says, ‘how the paint vibrated and created that feeling of the dream, because you can't really focus on it when it's thick and textured like that. You get the general idea of the image and then as soon as you look away, you can't really construct the entire image in your head the way it is in the painting, but you get the feeling of the painting, the ethereal energy from it.’