The Hammamet International Cultural Center welcomes until tomorrow, Sunday, September 28, an exhibition of paintings by the American artist Fedele Spadafora. This exhibition was born from an artistic residence in Dar Sebastian and has been continuing since September 14 under the title “reflections”.
In itself, this title chosen by the artist intrigues by his versatility and his intertextuality. Indeed, in the English language, the term “reflections” means as well reflections as reflections which itself suggests a thought in movement. In addition, this notion poses the presence of reality in a work which can both reproduce it or make it undergo a distortion.
Thus, from the first word, Fedele Spadafora’s approach places us in a gap which is that of the work in its relationship to reality. This real, the artist recreates him as he pleases while placing our eyes in a universe where hyperrealism is never absent.
In his way of making a portrait or a still life, Fedele Spadafora seems to be installed in a device that assimilates his paintings to photographs slightly nipped with blur but absolutely faithful to the model. This technique leads to works kneaded with truth and from everyday scenes or faces seized in their anonymous placidity and their cultural attires.
With a palette of great sweetness, the artist knows how to felt his colors, give them a photographic texture and a touch of eternity. Sometimes abstract and impressionist at the same time, sometimes in the way of the great Dutch, Fedele Spadafora restores fragments of truth, observation sheets and a game of reflection of light.
As he sees them, his characters are endearing, patinated by the light, chised by time. When he paints fruit, they are fleshy, gleaming in the reflections and weighed down by their shadow.
This new series of the American artist who lives between New York and Hammamet amply deserves the detour and completes to perfection, the previous series entitled “Carthage” of which it constitutes a second side. While the finishing of the exhibition “reflections” is for tomorrow, there is still time to discover the inspirations of an artist who feeds on Tunisian lights and the previous echo of many travelers who also sublimated our country, its peasants and its landscapes.
