Today is the opening of Vena a new solo show with Italian artist Centina at Téke Gallery in Carrara, Italy.As pointed by the gallery, Centina’s art isn’t easy to digest, and there is where the charm lies. Sometimes grotesque, sometimes playful, Centina’s art is both dark, conceptual and raw, it speaks to your unconscious, to your fears and dreams.
The work exhibited at “Vena” isn’t an exception consisting of a series of new drawings, installations, sculptures and a couple of walls connected to a feeling of disintegration present in our reality.
‘This feeling emerges in the illustrations, where human faces disintegrate into smaller and smaller pieces, making almost unrecognizable the person depicted disappearing in a fractal in the white of the paper, in the wallpainting, where the characters depicted are deformed to the point to completely lose the connotations, disintegrating and losing all their humanity we perceive only the clothes that remain attached to these grotesque figures, drawn with blacks and violent scratching, full of concern but without identity.
Even in the faces of the sculptures the identity melts, transforming the faces in geometric solids that stretch, a fragility that tapers to almost disappear, in a deliberately glossy white and boisterous, sometimes soiled by the cast in gold, unique hallmark of expressionless faces and elongated in a grimace of exasperation impassivity, all the same, replicating, ready to be played endlessly without ever being able to find a true identity.
The only sculpture that completely dissociates itself from this distorted world, made of white Carrara marble, is an enlargement of a previous work done by Centina on wood depicting the skull of an owl. When I asked him why he decided to make this sculpture, his first answer was “I like to collect skulls of animals” and it is precisely for this reason that in this sculpture I see a message strongly opposed to the rest of the exhibition, a return to the pure representation of something that no longer exists.
As the abandoned factory, skeleton of the past, becomes a means of communicating unwellness today; marble, unchanged for centuries, becomes a means to talk about something real, natural, untainted by human nature, and that in the representation of his death will remain fixed forever, carved in marble, while the factories gradually crumble and nothing will remain of them. – Marco Pedri
Vena opens today Saturday 12th of December and will run until January 16th at the gallery located on via Santa Maria 13/D 54033 Carrara. For more works exhibited at Vena have a look at the catalogue here.
Author: Fran
Founder and editor of Urbanite. Street Art lover who after the finishing her MA thesis on the Mexican and Norwegian muralist movement in the 1920-50s, developed a fascination for street art and graffiti that eventually led to collaborations with different art blogs, including the creation of this one.
