Video Link: In the Gallery: Robert Bosisio’s Paintings & Asian Classic Interior Design| W.ONESPACE
W.ONESPACE is honoured to present Italian artist Robert Bosisio’s first solo exhibition in China: Painted Stillness. This exhibition will reveal the artist’s most representative series of portraits and interiors, and will focus on the sense of stillness present throughout his work, which reaches out beyond real time and space.
Robert Bosisio was born in Trodena nel parco naturale, northern Italy, in 1963, and graduated from the University of Applied Arts Vienna, where he was taught by Professor Adolf Frohner, a representative of Viennese Actionism. Robert has studied and lived around the world, fervently defending the legitimacy of painting and exploring its boundaries with an independent and earnest attitude. In 2011, recommended by one of the most famous Oscar-awarded film directors and art collector Wim Wenders, Robert participated in the 54th International Art Biennale Exhibition, in Venice.
In his creative work, Robert Bosisio has focused on a few different themes: portrait, still life, landscape, and interior, which do all propose the description of an anonymous illusion rather than an individual concrete object. In the 2020 British Portrait Competition (The Oscar in portraiture - British Portrait Competition), Bosisio exhibited a portrait of an albinotic African youth. This work attracted great attention and also reflected the distinctive characteristics of the blurred facial features of his portraits, which render vain all attempts at deducing the subject’s identity. In Bosisio’s portraits, the face, mouth, and other parts of the figure’s body appear as if wrapped in light fabrics which illuminate the dark background. As the viewing angle and distance change, the image and contour of the figure start to lose focus and the latter detaches itself from its original figurative form. While constantly exploring the process of the disappearance of form, Bosisio focuses on painting the soul of life and tries to lead his viewers to concentrate once more on the expressive force of the painting itself.
Influenced by the northern renaissance that swept through Flanders and the Italian mild sunlight, Robert Bosisio depicted a touching atmosphere in the space in his interiors: some focus on delicate depiction and compact structure, while others centre on hazy and abstract expressions, their painted surfaces shrouded in warm hues of light. Most of them present a spatial structure formed by extremely simple geometric shapes — an empty room with a door leading to otherwhere. Functioning as a connective tunnel between two distinct places, the door’s border and its extension are bathed in a faint light resembling a vague and unattainable horizon, which may stimulate the viewer to contemplate and explore the distant, detached reality, and the endless space that lie beyond.
In this exhibition, W.ONESPACE also discusses the representation of geometry in painting in Western and Oriental cultures. In Oriental culture, the folding screen may function as a medium to isolate the viewer from a world filled with noise and things through a peaceful, separate inner space in which one may contemplate paintings. In addition to separating spaces, the screen may mask certain objects and amplify the distance between things. Its square border echoes the geometric elements in Bosisio's works, so that the viewer's vision overflows from the real world into the painted space. One veiling layer after another, his paintings lead everyone to gaze into their mysterious and still whispering expanses.
Robert Bosisio wrote in his work notes: “I love passionate, but not loud painting.” When we observe his paintings, they seem to invite viewers to immerse themselves in their deep spaces and peaceful moments, experience the reality and consciousness of life, while listening to the painting’s whispers, and feeling the painted stillness.
