Hugo Scibetta at Clima Gallery, Milan

Untitled (2015), mixed media (oil on canvas / blue black billboard paper), variable dimensions
Photo: Marco Davolio

For his first Italian solo show at Clima Gallery, artist Hugo Scibetta created a new body of work dealing with the concept of apartment gallery.
In the first and second room, the artworks draw inspiration from the famous contemporary art reviews website Contemporary Art Daily. The artist started from the assumption that, as a digital native, he is incessantly overwhelmed by different artistic inputs, many more than those a person who’s networking and visiting exhibitions could possibly take.
So in this continuous scrolling, his interest goes to what remains on the retina. Scibetta selected random images from other art shows and slowly enlarged them to the point where they become blurred, and the viewer can’t figure out the original subject anymore. Then, he brings them back onto the canvas by using an inkjet printer or, for bigger sizes and wallpaintings, onto blue back paper.

Untitled (2015), mixed media (oil on canvas / blue black billboard paper), variable dimensions
Photo: Marco Davolio

87.88.188.129 (2015), UV print on Dibond, steel, 70×149 cm
11 87.88.188.129 (2015), UV print on Dibond, steel, 70×149 cm
Photo: Marco Davolio

In the back room, two “fake” watercolors can be considered the vanishing point of the apartment show perspective.
In these artworks, what emerges is the artist’s will to confront himself with the old masters’ technique of en plain air. But again the author, as a digital native, draws his inspiration from the Internet.
He picks out of random internet archives inspiring images shot by other people – in this specific case, a view of Miami’s harbor – and then watercolors them, reproducing the painter’s gesture. When he eventually prints the image, it’s hard to recognize the original from Scibetta’s intervention.

Exhibition view: Hugo Scibetta, All good things must come to an end at Clima Gallery, Milano
Photo: Marco Davolio

As an imaginary sum of the show, in both rooms there are works from the Sculpture attempt series.
Each of them is composed of a chair – like the typical museum or exhibition venue contemplation chair – and a 3D-printed crate, that is a copy of a French Medieval vase.
The jars originally come from a work by Oliver Laric, who 3D-scanned the entire Lincoln Center Archive in New York, and put the files in free streaming, so that everybody could 3D-reproduce any artwork in the archive.
The surrealistic fake balance in which the crates stand in between the wall and the chair tries to question what makes an artwork nowadays, at the same time dealing with contemplation and reproducibility of art and the idea of artwork itself.

Hugo Scibetta: All good things must come to an end at Clima Gallery in Milan until January 23, 2016