The first exhibition of work by the Turin artist Diego Scroppo opens at the Guido Costa Projects Gallery at 7 p.m. Thursday 20 September 2007.
Senza luce (without light) is a sort of three-dimensional probing into the Origin.
The initial intention was to organise an exhibition of paintings that would group together a small portion of the artist's prolific output (black and white enamel paint and artificial pigments on plastic). Increasing levels of meaning have since been grafted on to the first selection, turning it into a three-dimensional hybridisation of content and container, painting and frame. To some extent, this is a straightforward biological process, almost as if the flat image needed depth in order to come alive and adapt more comfortably to the gallery space.
The various pictorial patterns used by Diego Scoppo (fluid, sensual and decidedly solid abstraction, worked with the patience of a miniaturist), are repeated, blown up, stretched and folded back on each other. In other words, they follow a sort of phylogenic development until taking on their present zoomorphic form of the kind found in an out-of-this-world bestiary.
The images embody their own life, swallowed and vivificated by their own vital elan.

In many ways, the strongly narrative result recalls the paradoxical appearance of those life forms that haunt the darkest depths of great oceanic abysses, where the radical conditions of life propel nature towards the impossible. Diego Scroppo is likewise carrying out his formal research in a realm of the impossible by exploring a sort of alien, Martian neoclassicism, a hair's breadth from the grotesque forms by HR Giger and, more clearly, surrealist mannerism. But his work taps that vein of pure sculpture hewn out of marble and stone (but here it is synthetic and lysergic).
The living presence that accompanies the exhibition can best be explained in this light, or better, in this soft and pulsating obscurity. It is as if all forms, colours, meanings and fortune's forces are being drawn into a back hole.
Like a light in the darkness.

The exhibition of work by Diego Scroppo will be open to the public during gallery opening times until 31 October 2007.
Diego Scroppo was born in 1978 in Torino, where he attended the Accademia Albertina School of Art. He is represented exclusively by Guido Costa Projects. Senza luce is his first exhibition.