DELUGE
GIOVANNI L. BASSAN
NOVEMBER 15 – DECEMBER 15, 2019 | PARIS
As a contemporary artist, articulating the breakdown of the distinction between high/low culture, Bassan lends a European voice, with the sensibility of classical, historical painting, to the expressionism of the new figurative painting. As an observer of the quotidian, Bassan's painting is a journey through the Parisian heterotopias, those sites of the elsewhere, beyond convention and norm: In the convoluted atmosphere of the city's alternative party scene, a rapidly shifting landscape, the artist becomes voyeur, portraitist, and participant. Incomplete images, almost cut out from history painting, appear before us juxtaposed, often half-broken, tilting towards the edge.
Inhabiting this realm of ephemeral time, Bassan is referring constantly to a fragmentary self and world, captured in vivid moments of intimacy, intense self-surrender, and tenderness, bringing into light a painterly world that is not only an aesthetic but also a commentary on itself.
In the film “A Life Lived” (1982), Philip Guston looks back at his career from its beginnings in social realism toward abstract expressionism and ultimately a very unique representational style, The artist is questioning what he calls the 'increasing boredom' of artworks from the past that 'complete what they announce they are going to do'. It is under the poetic influence of Guston's quest for the incomplete painting that Bassan sets out to document his own lived moment, searching for the now-time, in an era of profound transformations and sharp uncertainties.
“Deluge” is a series of three paintings that Guston completed in the 1960s, in that moment of transition from abstraction towards the new representational style. Bassan's painting work in the exhibition, far away from the hollowness of zombie abstraction but also from the literalness of the new abstraction, is digging out this expressionist rigor and giving thus a lasting presence to ephemeral, empty time. In this intangible aesthetic of desire, Bassan longs to continue working over and over on the same painting idea, often leaving (and hanging them without frames) his paintings in this suspended state, where things are yet to come. Or, in the words of Guston: “What is seen and called the picture is what remains – an evidence. Even as one travels in painting toward a state of 'unfreedom', where only certain things can happen, unaccountably the unknown and free must appear.”
ARTWORKS
Giovanni Leonardo Bassan
Giovanni Leonardo Bassan (1989) is an Italian artist based in Paris, France. He studied at the Arturo Martini Art School in Schio and then at the Politecnico di Milano, where he graduated with a major in industrial design in 2011.
Since then, Bassan has had numerous solo and group shows around the world. He is known for his figurative paintings, which collage together elements across multiple times and contexts, as well as his combination of traditional techniques with unusual media.
Giovanni Leonardo Bassan has collaborated with The Mine for his solo show, Martyrdom (2015) in Dubai, as well as the pop-up exhibitions Everything Distracts Me (2016) and Deluge (2019) in Paris.
INSTALLATION VIEW
