Antonio Colombo is proud to present a double solo show by Gabriele Arruzzo (1976) and Luigi Carboni (1957), In Opposte Coincidenze.

Seen together, the works of the two artists may appear to have nothing in common. Our preconceived notions about painting, in fact, would assign them opposite roles. This project offers a chance to look at their work together, to discover shared relationships, concentrating on the logic of difference.

Everything is there before your eyes: figurative and abstract, decoration and ornament, memory and recollection, form and color, detail and whole, stillness and rhythm. The paradox of this mutual, simultaneous dialectic crosses the sense of the show, where nothing is directly offered yet everything is revealed.

Two distinct generations that approach the same artistic medium in a different way, though the former was the student of the latter at the Fine Arts Academy of Urbino.

Precisely the legacy and mystery of the figurative arts of that city form the leitmotiv, for Gabriele Arruzzo, of this new cycle of works where, in keeping with his usual modus operandi, the I blends with the We and the painting becomes the site of this gathering. In a calculated, flat pictorial construction, heir more to the Byzantine tradition than to American Pop Art, the artist amalgamates the elements of his personal universe with the golden ratios of Luca Pacioli or decorative schemes derived from the pavement depicted by Piero della Francesca in the Flagellation of Christ conserved in Urbino.

Each of his works, like theater, thus becomes the place where History is staged: a tale of how painting self-generates in the attempt to surpass, through Art, the very limits of human existence.

For Luigi Carboni paintings immersed in color form a narrative itinerary ruled by ambiguity and based on the relationship between chance and artwork, an implicit continuity of viewer, seer and visionary.

In the paintings, a very intricate plot of signs and decorations is formed on the surface. The work gathers and conveys a portion of the world through unstable, indelible inscription, constructing a complex weave of images in which figurative recognition is lost in the blur of perspective planes and the total absence of traditional spatial references.

The artist sets out to challenge the border between lyrical abstraction and everyday figuration, between decorative style and intimist results, making the works impermeable to any narrative development.

These paintings, in the fullness of the various applied codes, speak of an art of plurality of opposites, where artistic invention takes on the characteristics of conceptual reflection.

“Classicality and experimentation are the paradox of a mutual and simultaneous dialectic. Contemporary beauty is perceived and conceived as a composition of conflicting parts, where visual pleasure can be transformed at any time into abuse, where the quietest of objects can become vexatious, without us knowing why”, Carboni explains.