“Working on the canvas means developing a constellation of ideas connected to time, knowledge, and data: from time to the sublime, from data to the economy, and, ultimately, back to painting”. With these words, Francesco João, an Italian Brazilian artist (b. 1987) working between São Paulo and Milan, articulates an approach that, for more than a decade, has expanded painting into a practice capable of examining its own limits.
The exhibition, developed in dialogue with curator Massimiliano Scuderi, introduces a reading of the work of Salvatore Emblema (Terzigno, 1929 - 2006).
A selection of Emblema’s works, created between 1969 and 1976, highlights how the interplay of surface, light, and environment defines an operative field that extends beyond the confines of the canvas. Questions concerning space and landscape find a clear resonance in João’s practice, without, however, implying a direct continuity.
The works in which João leaves the stretcher explicitly visible do not belong to a tradition of which Emblema is among the leading exponents; rather, they take the form of structures suspended between painting and object. The elements of pictorial language – stretcher, canvas, frame, and color – are reorganized, reordering their hierarchy. They are sculptures in the form of paintings.
Similarly, the artist’s engagement with design and, more broadly, with the object – as in the case of a bench that is also a sculpture, or a sculpture intended for use – redefines the relationship between maker and viewer, calling into question the distinction between use and contemplation.
João states: “Spatial displacement is not so much a way of expanding painting as it is a means of questioning its conditions. I am not interested in bringing it into space to reinforce it, but rather to destabilize its hierarchies: between image and object, between function and contemplation, between those who produce and those who use. At that point, the relationship with design – inevitable in itself – becomes crucial as a mode of experience: once an object can be used, the nature of the relationship it establishes shifts, and the very system of values that underpins it is transformed.”

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“Working on the canvas means developing a constellation of ideas connected to time, knowledge, and data: from time to the sublime, from data to the economy, and, ultimately, back to painting”. With these words, Francesco João, an Italian Brazilian artist (b. 1987) working between São Paulo and Milan, articulates an approach that, for more than a decade, has expanded painting into a practice capable of examining its own limits.
The exhibition, developed in dialogue with curator Massimiliano Scuderi, introduces a reading of the work of Salvatore Emblema (Terzigno, 1929 - 2006).
A selection of Emblema’s works, created between 1969 and 1976, highlights how the interplay of surface, light, and environment defines an operative field that extends beyond the confines of the canvas. Questions concerning space and landscape find a clear resonance in João’s practice, without, however, implying a direct continuity.
The works in which João...

Read more