Combustions (Poltu Quatu)

The SimonBart Gallery 2017 exhibition season continues with Combustions, an anthological exhibition dedicated to the artist Dicò and coming from Complesso del Vittoriano in Rome.
The relevant group of works, which summarizes the artistic path of the pop artist born in Rome, will be presented in the two summer venues of the gallery, Poltu Quatu and Porto Cervo, with two different opening events in collaboration with Grand Hotel Poltu Quatu and Rolls-Royce Motorcars.
Dicò, one of the most interesting artist in the current Italian Pop Art, inherits topics and schemes of British and American pop language’s tradition. Like the Italian artists of Piazza del Popolo, active in the Sixties, he does not assimilate palely the American pop model, but interprets it with a very original language, also often elaborating new artistic techniques.
His works, painted on panel, are made with a mix of resins, stratifications of different industrial materials, combustions and corrosions. The portraits, characterized by intense expression, are fascinating and touching at the same time. But the main element of Dicò’s artistic language is plasticity, due to the power of fire to mould the plastic in the shape of unrepeatable sculptures. Dicò’s flames replace the traditional painter’s brush and thanks to the artist’s knowledge, they mold and punch the plexiglas sheet which surrounds paintings’ surface. Finally, the use of neons increases his paintings’ communication power.
“At heart, Dicò, with his commercial art background, is neither a born-again Burri nor an heir to Pop Art, even though both influences have greatly inspired him” as Vittorio Sgarbi explains in his critical essay in the catalog “also assuming other references, such as, for example, Street Art”. It is in this wise and spontaneous mix of different languages and references, sometimes even antithetical to each other, that Dicò's talent is recognizable: A compositional talent that want to debunk the myth of Pop.
“What Dicò aims for - Sgarbi underlines - is more the control of deterioration, which is configured using a different technique, among the most sophisticated at his disposal, and one that is able to purify the object as much as he needs, regenerating the work, without cancelling it or irreparably subverting it. On the one hand, this reveals a pragmatic conception of art, so that what counts is the object that one is able to work with, not what swirls around it. On the other hand, it gives the act of burning a connotation, which, while lacking a mystical afflatus, is still immaterial in nature. Further, the act of burning has been suffused with spirituality, superimposed, or one might even say augmented, thereby transferring to the object, changed as it is, an indissoluble imprint of one’s own personality.