Take 1
Winter 2015/2016
Acrylic on linen canvas mounted on wood
Dimensions of one picture: 93 × 140 × 2 cm
Overall dimensions: 160 × 148 × 2 cm
Ordinarily, the signature affixed to a painting remains discreet — a muted murmur in the corner of a canvas. It is not the subject, but the marginal trace of a gesture, a seal belonging more to the social realm than to the aesthetic. And yet, this mark can transfigure the value of a work, raising it up or weighing it down, regardless of its pictorial quality. It acts as the mirror of its author: should the artist enjoy renown, the signature becomes a talisman, a promise of worth — whether rightly or wrongly bestowed.
It is this mechanism that The Arrogance of the Artist stages. Here, the painting yields to the hypertrophied glare of my name. The signature is no longer discreet: it rules. It expands, it encroaches, it consumes the painted surface until it fills the entire field. Where the picture is absent, the ego paints its own reflection. And to consummate this excess, the signature spills beyond the canvas, spreads across the wall, colonises the exhibition space — a way of declaring that everything it touches now belongs to it. The true sovereign is no longer the work, but the name that claims it, and, through it, the artist who crowns himself master.
But what remains, without this seal? Does a work without a signature lose its power? Is the value of a painting reduced to the authority of its signatory? And is not the artist, in the end, condemned to this paradox: to become his own brand, a supposed mark of quality that pretends to endure forever?
K.L.
Extract 1
Winter 2015/2016
Acrylic on linen canvas mounted on wood
Dimensions of one picture: 93 × 140 × 2 cm
Overall dimensions: 160 × 148 × 2 cm
Extract 2
Winter 2015/2016
Acrylic on linen canvas mounted on wood
Dimensions of one picture: 93 × 140 × 2 cm
Overall dimensions: 160 × 148 × 2 cm
Take 1
Winter 2015/2016
Acrylic on linen canvas mounted on wood
Exhibition venue: Casa Bossi, 28100 Novara, Italy
Exhibition date: Spring 2018
Dimensions of one picture: 93 × 140 × 2 cm
Overall dimensions: 160 × 148 × 2 cm
Take 2
Winter 2015/2016
Acrylic on linen canvas mounted on wood
Exhibition venue: Casa Bossi, 28100 Novara, Italy
Exhibition date: Spring 2018
Dimensions of one picture: 93 × 140 × 2 cm
Overall dimensions: 160 × 148 × 2 cm
Extract 1
Winter 2015/2016
Acrylic on linen canvas mounted on wood
Exhibition venue: Casa Bossi, 28100 Novara, Italy
Exhibition date: Spring 2018
Dimensions of one picture: 93 × 140 × 2 cm
Overall dimensions: 160 × 148 × 2 cm