Presented first in the Rome and then in the Milan offices of Galleria Russo, the solo exhibition Jonathan Guaitamacchi. British Black One Way, curated by Francesca Brambilla and Marco Di Capua, features works of large, medium and small dimensions, tracing the course of his latest works: from the London views of Battersea to the South African suggestions of “the Mother City” to those glaciers. The title of the exhibition, British Black One Way, fully describes the salient features of the author’s poetics: “[…] Guaitamacchi works on opposites: on the one hand there is the black, the background of the canvas and, on the other, the white, which cuts through the deep space of darkness.” The artist creates metaphors of reality fixed on the canvas by a constant bichromatism, perhaps a necessary choice in order to allow himself to be invade the rarefied and blurred dimension of memory: then from the fumes of memory re-emerge the places that link the artist to the English territory and the Anglo-Saxon culture from which he comes from. The cliffs of Dover, the London ring road, become fertile humus from which to draw inspiration. His paintings are visions constructed through a language that moves between painting and architecture: metropolitan views, bird’s-eye perspectives, cityscapes, panoramas.
“His canvases, true architectural projects, tell the story of his vision. The memory is a recollection photographic, a project made of perspective, volumes and plans. Images that eventually become by his own admission abstract, observed from close viewpoints nothing more are but absolutely decomposed geometric forms perfectly embedded within a perspective abstraction. Only the distance defines their overall view.” “Among the first in the contemporary to look into the urban context, on the canvas he does not represent the total or merely architectural of reality, he releases its essence, its active principle; he does not tell about the place, but its reflection, its metaphor, it details and generalizes in the same instant” (F. Brambilla).
