MAN... vertical, plastic, surrounded by a dense gravitational space
SPACE... horizontal, silent, chained around the body in equilibrium
Jonathan Di Furia plays on an essential perspective principle, here recreated in the pictorial relationship between a single man and a delimited space. An interlocking between the vertical structure of the body and the enveloping openness of the horizontal landscape: each character thus has its elective place, as if it were a tailor-made suit, a silent stage without scenic artifices. The artist outlines a narrative through autonomous acts, where physical actions correspond to the theme of a single story. A sort of post-media metaphysics, daughter of Carlo Carrà and Giorgio Morandi, actualized in the margin of a black and white film but also in the digital codes of optical bench photography.
Gestures of bizarre simplicity float between empty vistas, alienating architectures, metaphysical modernisms and archaeological ruins... in the field there are only adult males, well dressed, sons of an urban culture that privileges the rigour of Beckett's appearances... "the loneliness of the first males" one could say, to paraphrase a novel that touched on the subtle differences between solitude and solitary life. There is no univocal feeling that explains the single picture, if anything an unstable chain of feelings more or less gloomy, more or less ironic, more or less dramatical... The picture becomes the mirror of a reality like ours today, where appearances move relationships, where the futile overcomes the essential, where dispersion exceeds conservation, where beauty is often an easy misunderstanding for superficial listeners.
The artist lowers the chromatic temperature and blends the intersection between figure and environment. He creates smooth variations in shades of grey, using colour in a thematically solid and conceptually stable way. Space Bound is a container of stories, places and characters apparently distant from each other. Common facts between metaphysical pathos and subtle irony, stories that speak of bizarre and extravagant characters, just like in everyday life: from the boy who observes the emptiness to the one who dives inside, from the businessman in precarious balance to the musician without an instrument... they are our stories, stories that are absurd, grotesque, paradoxical, but no more than the reality that surrounds us.
Jonathan Di Furia: "Man and surrounding space, an inextricable combination, a fragile interdependence. I am interested in behavioural dynamics within certain contexts. I am interested in how external phenomena can change the condition of internal factors: profile, emotions, inclinations, generating a constant process of identification. I focus my attention on the condition of existential emptiness, and then freeze it inside the painting... a painting used only as a pretext to underline the sense of precariousness that characterizes existence ".

opening : Saturday 17th February 2018 at 6 p.m. - 9 p.m.

mpefm ITALY art press release