Untitled, Size 40x40cm, Permanent Marker and Solvent on Paper, 2020

SONG SONG is pleased to present the second solo show by Venetian artist Michele Bubacco, in which he exhibits new works on paper.

 

Confined to three notebooks containing 50 sheets of 40x40cm drawing paper, Bubacco began drawing on both sides of each sheet and then applying alcohol solvent, from which new stories arose on either side by bringing both images into conversation with each other. The effect is one of simultaneously closing and opening the works to meet unexpectedly, and forcing the artist himself into the role of observer. Necessity here gives rise to a kind of freedom on the page.

 

Using this newfound transparency of the paper, the viewer is invited to read the possible interaction from two different directions. Each one reveals its own moods, shapes arise as they bleed into each other. These drawings are suddenly no longer controlled structural notes for Bubacco’s paintings, but pictorial in feeling. Simultaneously expressive and reductive, they leave the viewer with a warped point of entry, and the two-faced characters swimming within the page invite us to play.

 

These new works on paper are contrasted with a piece from the series Higitus Figitus, in which Bubacco took leave from his known style and worked in a manner akin to still lifes, reminiscent of the paintings one might find in restaurants in the countryside, “because they work like a trap”. The painted canvas hides a speaker behind, making the piece a vessel through which a series of recorded sounds play in a loop, interspersed with silence; a sort of cuckoo clock of unexpected relation between image and sound. “They stand like a trojan horse in a living room”, says the artist, startling a visitor by revealing more than its playfully mundane exterior, buried in its electrical belly.

 

The dual nature of these series speaks to the choices we make as viewers, both consciously and unconsciously. Michele sent me a list of freely associated words the other day, and their imaginative correlation now serves, in my mind, as a field guide to the world of his work. Combined they become “eco distortion”, “on the metamorphosis of behaviours” and “mythological beach games”.

 

 

Michele Bubacco (b. 1983) lives and works between Vienna and Venice