essay
personal exhibition, text by Carla Ricevuto and Robin King, curator, art critic and writer, 2020
Severino’s work can be considered a sort of storytelling of his quarantine. From the first work “Great green landscape with sky – 2019”, made towards the end of December, when we could still hug and kiss each other; up to the latest work “Great landscape atmosphere – 2020” where our bodies are kept at a distance by fear. A personal journey that also speaks of us.
Federico’s works are to be considered as an intimate and powerful experience of the visible that turns into a delicate and methodical action. Experience is, in fact, one of the central themes of all the artist’s work and for this Severino loves to quote the words of Mark Rothko who claimed that: “A painting is not a picture of an experience, It’s an experience”. Moments of personal experience translated through the use of oil pastels that from soft and pasty material are transformed into landscapes characterized by imperturbable lights.
Federico Severino has always researched, confronts and dialogues with horizons and with the multitudes of colors that blend with the landscapes he loves to explore. An example are his long walks on Etna, a Sicilian volcano, which, like other landscape and artistic beauties of this island, which is also the place where he comes from, inspired many intellectuals and travelers. It is useful to quote a travel writing – Journey to Sicily, 1953 – by the American art historian Bernard Berenson, who describes the colors and atmosphere of the volcanic landscape from the point of view offered to him from the window of his accommodation:
I went to the balcony of my room to watch the sunrise over Etna. His color was silver and purple over a delicate blush, which seemed to come from within. At the top, a snow diadem, and, below, the necklace of clouds. The great height of the mountain did not appear so because of its soft and long sides. The sea was a mirror that reflected the colors of the sky, gradually pervaded with red due to the rising from below of the sun, more and more present, although it was not yet discovered to my eye. A soundless calm, except that vast and immediately extinguished by the great expanse of the sea breaking when it touches the shore.
In the same way as Berenson, who describes the sea as a mirror reflecting the colors of the sky, Federico orchestrates his composition with suspended spaces that link these two elements. Hence the choice of the title of this exhibition: Between Earth and Sky. In the first selected works there is a material abstraction which, however, does not exclude the viewer’s understanding of the limit that delineates the boundary between the sky and the landscape. Borders and limits that the artist sees in both day and night environments, not excluding, moreover, the representation of urban atmospheres. A research that shifts its focus to more contaminated environments conceived by the artist as containers from which to obtain other material to add and reassemble, always using the essential. As in Urban Element_Grey – 2020, a reference to the city of Turin, and Yellow Underground – 2020, referring to his long experience in Berlin.
From this moment on that “Between”, among the sky and the earth, is even more extreme, abstract and lyricized by the compositions of “Atmosfere”. In these works the threshold of the limit is surpassed. Federico dares in the search for the visible that cleans up every superfluous element and every edge fragment. Each particle of matter becomes essential throughout the composition, particles that blend together thus absorbing the faint border mark, generating a larger and even more ideal space. Like a traveler, who notes his experiences in a diary, Federico Severino tells his research in which it is possible to see the dimension of the human being charged with passion, fear, amazement, and wonder.
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