On May 5th Gallery Poulsen in Copenhagen will open a new solo show by Nicola Verlato titled New Methodological Foundations for Contemporary Painting. The exhibition is centered around the idea of renewing figurative painting by implementing traditional methodologies of classical painting with digital CGI software.
The Italian born, LA-based artist has been working on this concept since the '90s and was probably among the first artists that used 3D CGI programs for figurative painting. The whole idea started after seeing the move Tron and noticing the resemblance between the vector graphic used for special effects, and early Renaissance perspective drawings. With that in mind, Verlato wanted to establish new methodological foundations for painting today, based on the implementation of such software into figurative painting. The entire show consists of six different chapters, each showing different relation between the body and the space, from a large 8x2 meter charcoal studies depicting football hooligans fighting, four paintings of the skaters in a modern art museum breaking a series of paintings by Ellsworth Kelly, six black paintings representing the infinite space beyond the surface of the abstract paintings, a cast resin sculpture and a drawing of Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse Now, all the way to the interactive app that allows viewers to interact with the works on view. "The Merging" app project was first introduced in 2016, and this time it will enable visitors to discover sculptural work from four plinths installed at the gallery, as well as "bring to life" all the other works in the show. As the biggest piece in the show, the large drawing is actually only lower portion of a huge composition that Verlato started on back in mid 80s, just after the massacre of the Eisel stadium. The violence of the hooligans is a sort of metaphor of this instinctive energy unleashed by action of drawing, and parts of this masterpiece have materialized in several phases and in several forms through the years. —Sasha Bogojev
