David Berkovitz, Felice Nittolo – Coupe à la carte

OPENING friday15 may at 6,00 pm
The exhibition COUPE À LA CARTE is a dialogue between the works of David Berkovitz and Felice Nittolo, curated by Alberto Gross.
COUPE À LA CARTE is a dance-like exhibition journey, punctuated by a lightness of vision and an intensity of thought, fragile and powerful at the same time, suggested rather than proclaimed, through a multitude of infinite horizons and the vastness they lead to. The parallel between the two artists is drawn in relation to their use of paper – viewed and practised through intentions that are dissimilar yet, at the same time, comparable. A fragile element par excellence, paper retains a dual nature, both practical and aesthetic: it protects and reveals, it can be precious or disposable, it wraps itself and unfolds, it is cut and is capable of causing the cut. When – breaking free from the preparatory phase of a work – it becomes the protagonist in its own right (not merely as a support, but as an essential and constitutive part), it fully unfolds its preciousness and elegance. The two artists experiment with its versatile malleability in accordance with a poetics that transcends the senses beyond the point of falling and vertigo.

Felice Nittolo, in his quest for rarity, uses paper as a canvas through which to convey his use of colour, or – by etching, scratching and pricking – he calibrates its rhythms and pauses. Convinced that what is breakable is already divided, the artist draws on the fragmentary nature of the material to create a chromatic composition of extreme visual tactility.

David Berkovitz employs a repetitive use of cut and line in an anaphoric manner without ever appearing tedious or mechanical, favouring a visual musicality that shines through the gaps carved out by time. White, black, red and gold are the colours favoured by the artist: the terrifying, dazzling and infinite stillness of white; a tormented and worn-out heart, drowned in the soot of black; a red bubbling of sparks carved into jasper; the incorruptible absoluteness of alchemical gold. The fissures follow one another, consuming space until they reach the fourth dimension.