Carlo Pecoraro
Who am I? Who are you?
By Tania Vetromile
Carlo’s surfaces are little but welcoming caves, places where the smallest lived moment can find a location to survive. Few elements, simple but just apparently meaningless, hide the narrative: the story of “us”, like a general feeling that is perceived as fragmented and not
connected anymore with daily actions. Carlo Pecoraro’s little paintings are tied together through a red line that relates to the human experiences of alienation, heroism and passion, in an anonymous form. There are sequences of faces, urban scenarios and hidden striking
gestures among desperation, waiting, hugs and abandon.
The ineffable but gripping stories – or tales – narrated by today’s consumerism, which get us through powerful advertisement campaigns and show us smiling families, beautiful girls and sweet little babies, have always that sense of “us” as protagonist, although the sensual voice of life is mute in it. The image that Pecoraro selects is the one he chooses to subtract from consumerism, selecting it among many. When in the canvas, that image stops being just a moment among many and it occupies the new offered space. Even if apparently they are free from emotional involvement, Carlo Pecoraro’s paintings transform the simplicity and the immediacy of his narration into recondite feelings, open to the inquietude of the time being.
Through various working stages, the paintings reach a final one where few eccentric violent colors paint the surface in unrelieved parts, playing with light and shadows. As result of it the image is enriched of visual and emotional suggestions: the subjects come out from anonymity, the narrative appears as timeless and the stories take advantage of a suffuse atmosphere.
Furthermore In Carlo Percoraro’s work there is a constant reference to the filmic image, often in its small format such as the television one. In fact he alternates decentralized framing, full shot and close ups in a compositive game that takes advantage of every narrative strategy.
The existential questioning that each character of Wim Wenders “Wings of Desire” expresses, are the same that artists are not afraid of asking themselves – who am I? Who are you? – and they are asked in this case first to the artist and secondly to you, viewer, that try to stop and look.