Giuseppe Modica, first time in Australia, will present Atelier di luce e di memoria (Light and Memory Atelier), a solo exhibition . Sasha Grishin, art critic and professor emeritus at the School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics of the Australian National University of Canberra, will present Giuseppe Modica’s work. Modica is one of the most representative artists in the Italian contemporary artscene. Some of his works are part of the Collezione Farnesina of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation. For his Austrialian debut, Giuseppe Modica created a number of works focusing on the understanding of the relations between light, memory, geometry, singularity. A research effort that he expressed through great technical skills. Modica’s artistic research may be part of the historical continuity of great Italian and European painters, from Piero della Francesca and Antonella da Messina to Vermeer and Velasquez, Seraut and De Chirico. By investigating the present, his art combines tradition and invention, a fil rouge running from the past through the present and towards the future: his paintings are shaped by time, light and memory, in a dimension that breaks with tradition to enter an extraniating and metaphysical suspension.
Modica was born in Mazara del Vallo, Sicily in 1953. He studied at the Fine Arts Academy in Florence and currently lives in Rome where he directs the Chair of the Painting Course at the Fine Arts Academy. A solitary artist, Modica cannot be fit in given trends or groups. He is a “metaphysically new” author combining tradition and innovation. Appreciated by art historian and critics as M. Fagiolo, V. Sgarbi, G. Giuffrè, C. Strinati, and literature experts as L. Sciascia, A. Tabucchi, G. Soavi, Modica held solo shows in Milan, Rome, Paris, Cologne, Bologna, Florence, Palermo . He also had retrospective shows hosted in institutions and museums (Aosta, Tour Fromage; Ferrara, Palazzo dei Diamanti; Treviso, Casa dei Carraresi; Roma, Complesso del Vittoriano; Arezzo, Galleria Civica; Palermo, Loggiato di San Bartolomeo; Marsala, Galleria Civica; Roma, Palazzo di Venezia). Modica was called to exhibit in international events such as the 8th International Contemporary Art Biennial in Cairo; Rome’s 13th Quadriennale of Contemporary Art, the 6th Engraving Triennial, in Milan; Novecento Siciliano, in Minsk, Moscow, Barcelona and Palermo; Milano Arte Italiana 1968-2007, Palazzo Reale; the 54th Venice Biennale, Arsenal, Italian Pavilion, Bad Frankenhausen Panorama Museum. Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco likes to describe Modica’s art as follows: “Modica’s paintings explore all that a light source can offer. A Flemish light and a Dutch light, the light of Antonello and the luminosity of Piero della Francesca; Stomer’s dark tones of light and Vermeer’s light that veers to brightness. The light of the light of the light .” “What matters to Modica is to evoke and conjure a whole world through crystal-clear fragments of vision. He unsettles layers of thoughts and long-forgotten emotions or emotions which may have never been ours, but that he made us believe they were.”
