Manuela Filiaci
Measuring. Mapping. Memory.
September 13, 2019 - Jan 5, 2020
Real Cubism, 2000, oil paint on cardboard and mixed media, various: 8" x 8.5" x 5.7" x 7"
For Manuela Filiaci, in the beginning, there was color then came form, geometric form, organic form, and organic form that grows from geometry. Her forms are often isolated, emerging, erased, and/or warped, bathed within fields of intense and shifting color. Fans, spirals, hourglasses, columns, arcades, trees, tables, screens….But not only do Manuela’s paintings exhibit forms, they often take the shape of spatial conundrums themselves, e.g., paper scrolls, cardboard boxes, cement bridges, forms that turn into and onto themselves, that fold and encircle, that hide and reveal, that come off the wall and into our space. There is a physics here, but one suffused with atmosphere and mood.
Manuela Filiaci was born in Vicenza, Italy, in the Veneto, among the neoclassical architecture of Palladio and the luminous, layered paintings of the Venetian masters; one might suspect that this is where her artistic tendencies were instilled. Yet, as a young woman, she spent a few years in Nigeria before eventually moving to New York City in the early 1970s where she graduated from the School of Visual Arts and quickly found herself among a vibrant East Village scene. It is within this always burgeoning New York art milieu that her artistic identity deepened and took shape. Here at 1GAP we sample a small portion of her prolific 40-year career. Our selection is by no means exhaustive nor systematic, but rather based on combinations that best highlight Manuela’s poetic, lyrical style and the placement afforded by this building’s signature architectural environment.
Containers, voids, surface, horizons, luminosity, color, atmosphere, geometry, paradox: all key words for naming what we see in the aesthetically nourishing work of Manuela Filiaci.
My pictures are maps, maps of simple and solitary places. Perhaps it is less strange to prepare maps with many small areas rather than vast expanses like oceans in which a person fears a lack of orientation. In a map filled with entries, it is always possible to hold on to something. Therefore, I attempt on the one hand to keep the space as open as possible, and, on the other, to measure it without imposing a limit upon it…
-Manuela Filiaci
This exhibition is curated by David Dixon.