Down in the Darlo streets dream chasing is spelt in the leaves some printed on Kazas tees or with baggy shorts covering knees shielded from the cold with the cold Cam’ron on Burton corner French baguettes dirty steps these streets belong to old memories Down by the sand the water creeps, and tones back colours as we all sleep, Night turns to day, down in the Darlo streets
-Oscar Sulich
Allegory is a word that comes to mind when thinking about the works presented in DISCOLOUR, Luca Blasonato’s first solo exhibition with China Heights. The mediums; canvas and stained glass, act to support the artist’s ongoing experimentations and obsessive studio practice, investigating the representation of colour, whilst traversing and allegorically referencing the medium of painting. The artist instils visual cues, sensations and inferences in his work that allude to the driving force behind his practice; to portray and guide his artworks through the lens of painting. The word lens is purposefully chosen here because to paint is to suggest an application of a medium that is gradually built up to create colour, shape, texture, or whatever the desired outcome may be. Poignantly Blasonato flips, reverses, and mangles this traditional understanding to expand the notion of what painting can be seen and regarded as. Instead of adding paint to a canvas, the artist here reduces and takes colour away, creates painterly stained-glass panels and stitches together canvases, guided by palette and shape. DISCOLOUR presents the artist’s experiments and musings on feeling and transcendence of medium to achieve incarnations of our surroundings, in simultaneously familiar and abstracted ways.
The title of the exhibition lends itself to the primary instigators in Luca’s practice, the use of and reduction of colour. Inspired by the world around him, the artist works from collected and lived source material that spans cultural reference, day-to-day vistas and photographs that are transformed to represent shadow, pattern, and organic forms. When working through his archive of source material, colour is the most important guide in choosing the direction of a body of work. Images are matched according to their palette and then viewed abstractly to pull shape and form. The link between the different mediums, or vehicles, in Luca’s practice is that in this elemental way, the canvases and stained-glass panels will themselves into existence, despite technique or medium. Luca is the conduit, bringing to life ideas and experimentations in creating paintings without traditional method. Canvases are bleached and colour is removed, panels are combined and then stained-glass sits as frame to nod and give shape to the importance of this foundation and of colour in the artist’s practice.
DISCOLOUR sees Luca’s first integration of stained glass in his practice, exhibiting 8 glass panels, as well as three large, stained-glass frames that border his canvas works. The idea to incorporate this medium stemmed from his previous exhibition with China Heights in 2021, where Luca screen-printed sections of acrylic frames. This experiment in turn triggered the idea to widen his practice and include the stained-glass component in his newest exhibition. The display of these works is key, they sit off the wall, either singularly or paired and suggest a reading that diverts from that of a window or light panel. A star, an infinity ellipsis, and abstracted segments of coloured, textured and patterned glass are connected to link to the canvases, they react with each other and exemplify a presence and absence of colour. This idea is particularly evident in Luca’s large canvas panel, In Pajamas, where large vertical pieces of stitched canvas provide a moment of intermission, and in the legacy of colour field painting, transfix and absorb attention of the eye through subtle tonal shifts. A duality occurs here, canvas at once recedes and emerges, leaving a coloured frame either sitting alone or in conversation with the artwork it borders.
DISCOLOUR is an exhibition where the recognisable is skewed through the intent of the artist, as Luca explains “I’m always working with painting in mind but trying to find a way to achieve that through other mediums. I want these works to give the viewer a feeling, more than anything, and work up questions rather than answers.” In this way, we are faced with a body of work that both opens interpretation and welcomes us, whilst challenging perception, and broadening the possibilities of the painted world.
-Eva Balog