SOLO SHOW
2022

Fluttering Lights
Galleria Doris Ghetta

22.10.22 –
20.01.23

We enter to find ourselves before a vast, silent cloud, delicate hues and blurred shapes. Warm nuances mingle with dark ones. We enter a space that is both heaven and a temple. Silence, slowness, contemplation. The space transforms the boundary between the real and the magical shifts. Bodies become landscapes and landscapes become light and colour. Following the slightest fluctuations of light, the images call you and lead you into another time, another space.
Robert Bosisio presents a new series of works in his solo exhibition Fluttering Lights at Galleria Doris Ghetta, where the South Tyrolean artist returns after the great international success of his exhibitions in China and Japan. With a selection of his most recent works, Bosisio shows faces, bodies and natural landscapes in Ortisei that tell of the artist’s passionate exploration of light and its infinite potential. 
With his well-established and recognisable artistic practice, Robert Bosisio has always affirmed his deep love for and unconditional interest in painting. It is a passion that primarily concerns the technical aspect. Over the years, he has developed a practice involving multiple layers of oil paint mixed with tempera, ash, sand, wax and mortar. This approach is rooted in a desire to understand our cognitive process and perception in a very profound and intimate way, and to question the way we look at the world. Indeed, Bosisio places great faith in painting, a medium that draws on thousands of years of tradition and yet speaks a contemporary language. For Bosisio, painting is the preferred medium to examine the way we perceive the Other. Like the artist, the viewer must perform an act of trust in painting in order to gain full access to the artist’s aesthetic universe.
In his studio in Trodena in the province of Bolzano, Robert Bosisio works in an architectural structure designed and built specifically for light, starting with the natural light that falls into the studio in a regulated, precise and almost scientific way. Like a laboratory where the perfect lighting is measured and examined: soft, natural and enveloping. This architecture of light allows the artist to create works whose real subject becomes the painting itself, and where the colour or the shape portrayed is only a pretext to explore the changing possibilities of light. “I try to stretch the poles of light and dark as far as possible,” writes Bosisio, “without losing or erasing colour. These poles lead to the areas of colour gradually taking on average values, and the average values in turn help the two poles to become more intense.”
Whether we are looking at an arm, a shoulder, a cloud or a horizon, Bosisio’s works have the power to lead the observer to an ecstasy of the gaze, where the eyes remain mesmerised by the delicate brushstrokes of colour on the canvas. Likewise, Bosisio works on the illusion of painting, which thanks to colour can bring a window or a niche to life and create three-dimensionality where before there was a two-dimensional canvas. This contradiction between what is really on the canvas and our perception has always represented a specific possibility of the painting medium. For Robert Bosisio, it is precisely this ability of the medium that, even after centuries, still holds something urgent for him to communicate to the contemporary world.
“I love passionate painting, but not noisy painting,” says Bosisio, who seeks silent, simple painting that carries an aura of contemplation and introspection. Slowness is a central aspect of his research, evident both in the artist’s painterly practice – Bosisio works on the same canvas over and over again, even after a long period of time, slowing and widening the pace of his work – and in the subjects portrayed, which gradually fade or are enriched with a new shade or nuance, slowly making their way across the surface of the painting. A slowness that also involves the gaze of the viewer, who slows down before these works to perceive the richness of colour and the declinations of light, gradually reaching a state of calm and serenity.
In this sense, visiting the Fluttering Lights exhibition is like an exercise in meditation.