2006
Milano, Galleria Atelier
THREE GRIPPING ARTISTS
The Works of Charap, Pesciullesi and Rosselli
Galleria Artelier
January 21 – February 10, 2006
Frederick Charap, Paolo Pesciullesi and Franco Rosselli are
three artists of the highest level. Their work resonates both
with a powerful creative passion and, at the same time, the
courage to adhere to a meticulous aesthetic standard. Whoever
pauses to examine their work attentively cannot help but be
fascinated and moved.
But let’s proceed one by one. Frederick ( or Fred, as he likes
to be called) Charap is Jewish, born in the United States but
of Russian origins. These three interior realities, these
three histories, these three cultures have worked profoundly
upon his intellect and his spirit; what emerges is a man and
an artist of culture and consciousness, with a great
sensitivity to the events of the world both as history and as
significance, contradiction, suffering. The artistic
realization is projected through the material, the colors and
the symbolic implications of the signs, all of which intersect
and are superimposed much like the motivations of the
intellectual and moral fundament in which they have their
roots.
His work has been defined in various ways: “abstract lyricism”,
“lyrical abstraction”; his material surfaces and deep cuts of
the hand have been compared to modern graffiti. I like the
word “graffiti” for Fred because it harkens back to atavistic
presences, to rooted antiquities. An “ancient” upon which has
been grafted the modern, or rather, the drama of the modern.
Before leaving America and coming to live in the Tuscan
Maremma, Fred lived and worked between San Francisco and New
York.
That is tosay, he experienced personally the urgency of the
years of Abstract Expressionism, of jazz as the soul of the
world, of the Beat Generation, of the Cold War. And he lived
in the focal points of urban violence as well as of a
generation’s alienation from consumerism and technology. Where
to find an exit, to “save” oneself on the creative level? In
constructing “artistic objects” that are free, autonomous,
unmediated. And, in fact, in coming to Italy, to Tuscany. What
I find incredible here is that his colors, on the one hand,
contain suggestions of tragic allusions --- flames? smoke?
matter that decomposes like everything that lives? nature that
beseiges us? a world in rebellion? ---and on the other, they
takes us back to the lessons of the great masters of the past:
certain gilded passages remind one of Giotto no less! Works,
in sum, that are transfigurations and allegories of a living
world and which recount in their totality both the torment and
the beauty of Being as it occurs historically. So is this
abstraction? Is the soul, is the mind, abstract or concrete?
Renzo Ricchi
