RI-FLESSO URBANO

The CITY, ultimate expression of the endless contrast between progress and barbarization, is RE-FLECTED within the works by many artists (among which Wilfred LANG, Angelo ACCARDI and Pietro SCAMPINI) who, trough their representations, reach its inner tensions letting the individual’s residual values re-emerge.
Also the images of the stereotypes of the metropolis are RE-FLECTED: skyscrapers, bridges, roads, as well as the ones of the nightmares (traffic, the mastodon-ships, the frenzied running of the pedestrians) which appear both in the “straight” –the visual perception- and in the “reverse” –the deriving emotions and anguishes- narrated and emphasized by the artists. A reality/non reality which, only through the colour and the brush-stroke, the bright and the dark, can become malleable; can FLEX, turning from the cold rigidity of iron and cement to the world of tactile sensations which envelops us any time we interact with the URBAN landscape. Thus becoming re-production of a wider universe, to which the big ships by ACCARDI refer, towards which the little drifts by WILFRED sail or the men by SCAMPINI head with unvaried and fast steps.

We must not be surprised by what is found within the cities by ACCARDI, the ones “fixed” upon the canvas are always indecipherable facts, but when we observe them, we feel like being part of events which RE-FLECT us. A face, the sound of a pace belong to us. We are the automatons of “modernism”, constantly marching towards nothing. A continuous ambiguity, as the one proposed by WILFRED LANG, artist born in Shanghai, but active in New York. His interpretation of the urban landscape is filled with real and abstract figures, too refined, ethereal and made of luminous matter to be real, too recognizable to be abstract. From this repeated ambivalence his personal tale of the extreme landscape, that is the contemporary city, arises. Metropolis intended as the place where man, as a modern samurai, faces impossible challenges which do not accord any relief. ANGELO ACCARDI, from Salerno, is as well an unquiet painter, who indulges himself in RE-FLECTIONS upon the value of the symbol as an element of connection between real dimension and the hidden truths of a parallel world where it can be unveiled and deciphered. Rhythmically the slight figures by PIETRO SCAMPINI march towards nothing; created at the end of the 70’s, they recall Africa, a place where movement means the effort of reaching a (better) place free from sufferings.
A walking humanity researching a fairer world, which is still out of reach. Wilfred LANG, Angelo ACCARDI and Pietro SCAMPINI are, therefore, three artistic personalities who through different visions, in different places and times, have redirected their glances towards urban contemporaneity, its contradictions, its denial. After having seen themselves RE-FLECTED upon their uncertainties, they show us ours.