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