Follow the link below for a catalog exploration of this collection - a tour de force - by Fabio Modica.
https://issuu.com/lowegallery/docs/modica_thedefeatofabsence_2020/2?fr=sNTc1NjE1NTQ2NTk
Sicilian painter Fabio Modica is among the most passionately collected young artists of our time. His seductive work is characterized by an operatic use of color to cinematically depict the faces of hauntingly beautiful women. Modica’s artistic virtuosity has earned him acclaim from critics, curators and collectors around the world.
Modica’s most recent works included in the catalog, The Defeat of Absence, is a tour de force in which he makes manifest his mandate to avoid the fall into an anarchist “everything is art” construct. His blunt, luscious application of paint in a kaleidoscopic array of color presents the human visage as a topography of the soul. Fabio’s process and pictorial language rebuke vacant vocabularies that have long dominated contemporary art, and further underscore his fundamental belief that the artist should take a moral responsibility toward the recipients of their artistic creation.
Like an artist-scenographer, he lays down multi-layered coats of vibrant paint spread over a tortured canvas with rigorous spatula strokes as if he was “action painting”. Fabio’s colors are to be considered as phantom, that is, sheer visual specters deprived of any physical reality and, insofar as one can imagine – to be deemed as pure emotions (Isaac Newton). The artist makes sure that his figures look beyond the viewer’s gaze by projecting them into the metaphysical dimension of the whole of time. . .”incorruptible time” – which is past, present and future at once.
Fabio Modica’s painting is a kind of devotion, a reverent homage to “presence”. It is rooted in the Gnostic idea that we are, indeed, prisoners of matter – needing some means of liberation from the biological constraints of the human spirit. Human creativity is one of the traditional means by which we slip the surly bonds of Earth (John Magee) without benefit of divine intervention. This body of work acts as a delivery system to facilitate a “communion” between viewers and this transcendent dimension.
