Cool paintings is a solo exhibition by Italian artist Fausto Bertasa presented in the gallery Il Castello - Modern and Contemporary Art for the very first time. The gallery will show a new series of oil paintings created between 2016 and 2018.
Since the ‘80s Fausto Bertasa has been one of the leads in the Italian and European art world, his work speaks about visual codes of our contemporary reality and explors the world of media, barcodes and painted words, international newspapers and the Internet, PC keyboards and mouse pads, and he does it with particular attention to new technologies and means of communication, verbal, digital and written ones.
Despite different types of art Fausto Bertasa is specialized in (neon lights, photography, sculpture, video, drawing), his artistic research has been always putting painting in the foreground, and as a COOL PAINTING, codified in 'cold painting’ art movement, it is akin to works of American Masters (such as Philip Taaffe and Peter Halley) and Austrian ones (such as Heimo Zobernigs, Franz Vana and Gerard Rockenschaub). His painting style is based on the pursuit of the possible aesthetics of a mechanical codification, on the reality mooted by new mediums of communication, so the artist tries to bring a new geometry to the surface, that of a post-industrial society and today’s post-truth world. The main theme for this new exhibition is in fact the word, the letter, basic code of our communication, a fundamental tool of our everyday language, represented here in the act of destruction, breaking, rotting, to make it unrecognizable, discomposing it in atoms and pixels to the point where it loses its original meaning, to turn it into something new, whilst the meaning of its message seems to be interpreted within a purely aesthetic truth.
The artist thus stands as a witness of his time while painting is still the main protagonist, and day after day, era after era, it reveals itself throughout the creative tension, as if it wanted to dominate the scene at all costs, under any circumstances, even in a cold, mechanical and dehumanizing present. In his work, Fausto Bertasa focuses on an idea embedded in the social and cultural context of our time, he’s reflecting on the character of modern tools of mass communication, which messages simultaneously reach a large number of people, generating in their daily life strong processes of the amplification and redundancy of the news, and so creating a homogeneous and ephemeral collective imaginary, which is today unable to discern the truth from the artifice of the narration.

VERNISSAGE :
Wednesday 20 February 18:00
Admission: Free

mpefm ITALY art press release