Evanescence is Strength

From 5 August to 30 September 2022, three extremely talented artists exhibit 

at the Civic Museum of Santa Chiara in Noto: 

Silvia Berton, Alessandro Costagliola and Vincenzo Zarbo

Friday 5 August, at 6.30 pm the opening of the exhibition curated by Vincenzo Medica, founder of Studio Barnum contemporary, discoverer and promoter of artistic talents and Carlo Tozzi, founder of st-Art, an international company based in Amsterdam that promotes established artists and acts as an incubator for emerging artists. 

The three authors and the curators discussed the theme of Evanescence seen as a virtue, expressed in a visually different way, but producing the same effect on the observer: Inner Strength and Energy. 

Evanescence as an abstraction from reality, perceived as transparency that generates isolation, is an extremely widespread condition in artists and in the subjects they represent. Despite this, the power of these three artists is to represent evanescent subjects, but strong, isolated but only apparently, actually showing a vigour of expression and a great inner balance. 

Silvia Berton in her works expresses a physical evanescence, but a great inner strength. Her subjects are young women whose beauty and fragility exude from the pale faces created by the artist. Nonetheless, they have a firm expression not allowing for compromises. The power of her subjects can be clearly captured in the looks of these young women, girls marked, tired, but full of determination. The artist uses cuts on the eyes and face exactly to induce a greater pathos in the observer. 

Alessandro Costagliola: Evanescent are the bodies modelled by the artist that fluctuate plastically suspended in the atmosphere, defying the force of gravity. As in Giacometti, the space around the sculpture plays a key and integral role; it is seen almost as an element of load-bearing tension. The result is surprising: The immaterial has become material, it participates, supports and pushes the bodies manipulated by Alessandro, with an almost impalpable lightness. 

Vincenzo Zarbo in his production portrays apparently ordinary, simple, anonymous people… .evanescent. In reality they are subjects with a strong inner complexity, boxers, with troubled experiences, whose faces are tested by life. Evanescent compared to a society based on external beauty at any cost, which is expressed in sometimes multi-coloured, other times monochromatic portraits, strongly inspired by the subjects of Lucian Freud and characterized by a sort of inner isolation.