Although he was not born in Tunisia, Fedele Spadafora is faithful to our country whose light has captured him for a decade and which he always finds with renewed happiness. American, husband of a Tunisian, this artist lives between New York and Hammamet and regularly exhibits works born from his stays in Tunisia.
Thus, in 2013, Fedele Spadafora presented a collection soberly entitled “New Paintings” at the Slag Contemporary gallery in New York. This series brought together landscape paintings, portraits and scenes of life. Furthermore, implicitly, Fedele Spadafora, whose origins are Italian, paid homage to the artists of this tradition: Maurizio Valenzi, Moses Levy and Antonio Corpora who are all three Italian masters of Tunisian painting.
Proud to be part of this legacy, Fedele Spadafora claims this belonging to a larger movement and summons both Klee and Roubtzoff and more broadly the painters inspired by Tunisia. It therefore contributes to this creative continuity and this presence of Tunisia in the visual arts.
In this sense, last year at the Kenneth gallery in New York, Fedele Spadafora did it again with a new collection whose title is “Carthage”. With around thirty paintings, an original perspective and a singular look are at work in this series devoted to Tunisia. The more lively and luminous palette absolutely contrasts with the New York themes and establishes a new poetry in the artist’s work.
This Tunisian temptation which runs through the creations of Fedele Spadafora has just experienced another realization which took the form of an artistic residency at the International Cultural Center of Hammamet. This stay resulted in a new collection which was exhibited at Dar Sebastian from September 14 to 28. Entitled “Reflections”, this series is made up of paintings which restore the fleshy beauty of a summer fruit, faces encountered randomly along the path and landscapes imbued with the soft light of Tunisia. This is the first time that Fedele Spadafora has exhibited in Tunisia, leaving for a time the American and German galleries to which he is a regular.
In English, “Reflections”, the title of the exhibition, means both “reflections” and “reflections”. This is indeed the challenge for this polyphonic series which embodies reflections of light while articulating a reflection on the inspiration of a foreign painter who himself considers himself indebted to a creative movement carried by numerous traveling artists.
