Layer by Layer

The works on display, of various dimensions, compose a language embodied in color and resin: works that recall the relationship with time, where the search for a particular pictorial sensitivity of color becomes, with the volume and the sculptural cut, the foundation of the work.

"My work is linked to time. "Tessere" "Rette" "Tondi" and "Compressioni" complete step by step my personal alphabet."

The exhibition explores the artist's language by tracing its fundamental stages.

Works born from gradual layers of tone-on-tone color and overlapping glazes that recall Venetian tonal painting and testify to Ivan's strong bond with his origins.

Enclosed in Plexiglas and polystyrene cages where the resin is strained and "released" after solidification, the works slowly acquire volume, in an operation of opening and closing towards the outside that the artist repeats almost ad infinitum to crystallize the passage of time in each layer; a process that is really interrupted only with the final placement of the work in space.

An equation of time, color and volume clearly visible in the contrast between the smooth and shiny surface of the frontal impact and the raw aspect of the sides that show the complexity of the work and the relationship between matter and sculpture.

COMPRESSIONI

The new series of works, which enriches the "alphabet" of Ivan De Menis, is born from the will to slow down the passage of time; but if in all the works the edges are the historical memory of the work, the place where the contaminations and the time necessary for the repeated manipulations of the artist are evident, in the "Compressioni" this is also true for the surface.

If the "Tessere" are formed layer by layer and the final tonality is the result of the superimposition of layers, the "Compressioni" are born from the will of protection and are carried out with polystyrene panels pressed on the canvas. A gradual evolution of the language, where each chapter is linked to the next and the new geometries that are formed are reminiscent of the previous "Rette" and "Tessere".

A journey where the relationship with space becomes fundamental, true continent of the work seen no longer in a frontal and didactic way, but in movement and observed from other perspectives, delving into volume, form and matter.

"Being an artist means letting myself be contaminated by everything that surrounds me, experiences, people and emotions that continuously come in and out of my life; only from this whirlwind of sensations I manage, extrapolating them, to create my artistic language".