Galería Alegría presents "Cut Out Paintings", the new exhibition by Enrico Della Torre (Tradate, 1988). The artist, from Italy, expands his research on the limits of painting by introducing new elements into his language, and questioning his own work dynamic.

As in previous exhibitions, Della Torre's pieces examine the boundaries and potential of the pictorial space, as well as the elements that are present and latent in the work. His style revolves around a possible degree zero of painting, and he looks into the relationship between gesture and structure, exploring the dialectic between expressive calligraphical lines and near-minimalist planes of black graphite.

However, the works brought together for this exhibition broaden out the artist's registers of composition, by incorporating fragments of discarded and unfinished works from the last two years. By being manipulated, sewn and juxtaposed, these scraps and offcuts have helped open up new avenues of development in the artist's most recent output. The different layers form new compositional spaces, casting light and toning down shadows, thereby enriching Della Torre's language. In this process of workshop archaeology, the painter calls himself into question, allowing irony, playfulness and self-critique to form an active part of the creative process.

In "Cut Out Paintings" we see, therefore, that ample and abstract surfaces give way to organic forms; we see how new lines and distinct silhouettes emerge, and a surprising aesthetic vocabulary arises, which embraces accidents and waste without any hesitation. The pieces invite the spectator to think about what elements a work of art should contain, what the limits of painterly language are, and what happens when this language, reduced to a minimum, undergoes a process of cutting, combining and recycling.

Enrico Della Torre is thus following a highly personal path, in which respect for the essential elements of painting coexists, naturally, with his questioning of the established discourses, and with the unabashed reflection upon the ideal modus operandi of truly contemporary painting.

Cuanto más primo, más me arrimo

Both Enrico Della Torre and Matthew Musgrave share a very similar understanding of painting. In a figurative sense we can say that Enrico and Matthew are cousins. They are cousins because they are part of the same family that understands painting as an exercise of synthesis.

They develop a sober and austere language. An exercise in containment that avoids and ees from effects. They are discreet, silent paintings, without any fuss or technical display.To be appreciated in its totality, one ends up -inevitably- coming close to them to savour all the nuances that these paintings have. In both artists, each gesture, each mark, each failure, each success has a signi cant value and con gures a universe full of details that investigates the essence of the painting itself.

My current works represent an investigation of the possibilities of the space of the painting. My intention is to reach the limits of its capacity to be occupied by elements, signs and mass. The search comes from an effort to discover less explored places and compositions, by legitimizing a gesture or an empty space as the only element in the painting. I work in layers, which often end up collapsing into monochrome, detached from its rhetoric and historicity.

I could perhaps refer to awareness of space, not in the sense of a limited three-dimensional entity, but rather in terms of perceiving the simultaneity of manifest and latent forms. But my interest is not only in how elements appear in a space; rather, it is the space itself that has a place in the experience of the person facing those elements.

I try to investigate the nature of space, through radical manifestations that subvert the usual manifestations, thus allowing its essence to emerge. The chromatic aspect is suppressed for the sole purpose of reducing the pictorial variables to a minimum. In using charcoal, an accessible and elementary material, I try to take full advantage of its properties while using the simplicity of the media as a stimulus.

Enrico Della Torre