Isaia Antonaci was born in Sesto San Giovanni (MI) in 1985, after studying at the Brera Academy in Milan in 2008, he dedicated his research to martial disciplines and oriental philosophies, traveling in Asia and living in New York.
His art seeking the essentiality of being through pictorial gesture. A material painting made up of “empty” and indirect actions, experienced in absence and fullness as Zen teaches.
Concep
Action is fullness in the void. From this principle all the work comes.
The result of the journey is liberation. The pictorial gestures dominate the form, the act is incisive, measured. Extremely aggressive elements break up the image, becoming the subjects themselves, if not myself. Body language replaces figurative language as a channel for transmitting information.
The sign becomes testimony of the present; traced and translated from one surface to another, it imprints the consequence of an action in the pictorial dimension.
The first casts developed are formed by black and white traces reflected on acetate sheets, which, when layered together, create depth and cut the size of the picture into levels. The light filters and reflects, the acetate makes the work delicate and temporary: the vitality captured in the work will be lost with it, when the acetate has absorbed all the light until it is consumed.
On the canvas, the material rejoins with the sources that made it so. Fire, water, earth, wood and gold are the five elements that govern the alchemy of movement, according to the Chinese martial tradition. These representations are energetic expressions of our being that manifests itself in the pictorial act.
The “mold matrices”, used as a means of translating the traces, overturn the work, where the residue of the body and the dissolved elements become protagonists. The goal, as for the painting, remains a facade, the starting point, a mirror in which to confront, where to reduce, eliminate any rigidity, any representation of a Self wanted by an unconscious rationality. “the gold is locked in the casket until its release”: it is a martial concept and of personal evolution. Purity has no form , spontaneously re-emerges through fasting from excess. The surfaces are excavated, remodeled, deposited outdoors, left in molds one on top of the other to transfer their own substance. Their task is to respond adequately to the unconscious state of our form, in relation to the external contrasts that surround us and alter ourselves, where man finds himself and confronts himself with the abstraction of the image of him. What is the difference between alteration and evolution, what cancels us and what instead allows the change towards a different consciousness? The change becomes a key to dialogue between the work and the viewer. Metamorphosis is the basis of this language and everything is well defined in a mental order in which the pattern is the change itself. But are we really masters of every data that manipulates our Form? The truth is a path of identity that we can rediscover through the movement of the body. Meditating and acting, in the totality of the moment we are reunited in the divine being. The gaze seeks the infinite in the depths of man, so that the works contemplate towards emancipation.
What is force, where is it found and how does it manifest itself? Reproducing the non-figurative becomes a different manifestation of the material that represents us. The work evolves innovative projections, towards a singular representation and denial of conformity, for an ever deeper clarity of identity, in a voracious society where the relationship with collective interconnection leaves a constant dimension of uncertainty.
“The exercise of the void”, (understood as wholeness and not randomness), serves to unite the individual in his order, finding satisfaction in the clarity of his properties.
Being in the whole, as the whole becomes us as subjects: it is unity that is reached in the glow of a gesture, if clear in our form / non-form.
