20 August – 10 September 2024
Although the subjects of his paintings are never preconceived and are born out of an absolute absence of certainties, self-portraits and landscapes can be seen as open windows allowing something other to fly in, revealing a transitory and elusive nature of his perception of identity. Paintings and drawings are imagined as sources of internal light, as screens. In charcoal
drawings the attempt is to retrieve the warm tone of the piece of paper. With his eyes open or shut the painter waits for that moment in which the grip on his subjects loosens. (Seboo Migone, 2021)
Studio Casoli presents Era, Ora an exhibition project by Seboo Migone. This exhibition is an intimate conversation with the artist, an inner monologue that develops at its own pace and rhythm.
The artist unfolds a narrative mythology that hovers between dream and reality. Through his paintings, he endeavors to represent a literary stream of consciousness, attempting to balance distant memories with immediate impressions. Migone reveals his emotional states on canvas. Emotions merge with fantasies, obsessions, and memories. His artistic language shifts between figuration and abstraction, with a clear reference to the material qualities of American Abstract Expressionism. Landscapes, still lifes, self-portraits, human figures, and animals alternate in the artist’s works, giving rise to unusual combinations and visionary scenarios.
Migone states: ” The bigger a painting is, the closer it comes to feeling like a natural fact. This is a paradox, as nothing is less natural than a monumental painting conceived a locality like the Val d’Orcia. Depth obtained through density of surface/mark: a tactile perspective. I enjoy the pull between painting taking you closer to things and it taking you somewhere else. I would like paintings to take me Somewhere Else.
In the last years it has become clearer that paintings and drawings are imagined as sources of internal light, as screens. In the paintings, light is more painterly, physical, in the drawings light is more like that from the headlights of a car, or the moon. I learned to recognize two energies in conflict, one that desires to reveal a clear image, that desires to make a direct statement, and the other that wants to negate, to hide, to create a third dimension.”
The exhibition features large-scale paintings from the early 1990s and more recent works: oil on canvas, watercolours, charcoal drawings, sketchbooks, bronze sculptures, some of which were realized in Filicudi.
Seboo Migone was born in Rome in 1968. Today, he lives and works between Rome and the Val d’Orcia.
His work is imbued with a bucolic background. He studied at Wimbledon School of Art in London and has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Italy and abroad, including in New York, Gibellina, London, and Rome. In 2022, he participated in Studio Casoli’s inaugural artist residency in Filicudi.
