Prima Visione #2. MATAHARI

OFCA International is very pleased to present the solo show Matahari by artist Filippo Sciascia as part of its program Prima Visione, from 22 October - 6 November 2016, at Sarang I, Yogyakarta, Indonesia.
Based in Bali for more than two decades, the Italian artist Filippo Sciascia is widely known for Lux Lumina, an ongoing series of almost black and white figurative paintings, based on photographic and cinematic sources; their impasto surfaces heavily worked by the painter, who runs a dazzling gamut of painterly techniques, to the point the painting’s skin cracks and tears so skilfully by intuitive calculation that its disintegration seems to be instigated from the inside out.

The program Prima Visione is showcasing the result of an ongoing period of new ‘research’. The installation works presented in Mata Hari are inspired by and constituted of a variety of media and natural materials like leaves and bamboo, found objects, photography and smaller paintings in specific settings.
When the painting series Lux Lumina revolved around the source of light in order to arrive at the picture, in the recent body of work objects are representative of the idea of light, dealing with it not by way of projection or reflection, but in a rather physical way of a transformed presence. In an evolution, which seems to be inspired by natural processes of growth and change, Filippo Sciascia establishes new aesthetic connections in his oeuvre, which are complex and metaphorical for the relations that exist in empirical reality. Drawing on the history and experiences of his earlier work, the artist goes about this intuitively and in a laboratorial associative process, which he himself describes as a practice of the “open frame”.
One binding element for example is the symmetrically arranged pattern of tilted parallels which is familiar as a natural building structure inherent in any leave. We find it as a transparent layer in the painting Matahari Terbit (2014), as architectural structure in the main installation The Fabrication of a Sculpture is an Elevation of the Ground/Earth (2016) and in Lumina Clorofilianna (2016), in which crops of giant actual leaves are glued on canvas in a specific aesthetic arrangement.

To emphasise on the character of a work in progress and the open discourse and artistic practice of transformation from which these new works derive, Sciascia decided to use the entire building at Sarang I as a setting for his exhibition. Works will be presented in the main exhibition hall, the garden hallway and the office. This way – while taking in the works – visitors to the exhibition can undergo a journey of passage through the building and its lush garden, which is metaphorical for how the artist describes his new approach and “the ecosystem of his work”.