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New showroom, work from 20 artists inc Adam Thompson, David A Smith, Adam Bainbridge, Gareth Cadwallader showing upstairs 20 Hoxton Sq now
Review Jan 23 2010 « | »
Filippo Caramazza at Hales Gallery Two reviews of Filippo Caramazza's ways of seeing at the Hales Gallery, Bethnal Green Road

Li-Mei Hoang

I'm rather in love with this notion, the idea of taking apart a historical classic painting and reconstructing it, to form a new one. Or working in completely different styles to reflect the different facets of a person or artist. Filippo's Caramazza's current exhibition at the Hales Gallery take viewers on a tipsy-turvy mini adventure to decipher not only his deconstructed and reassembled artworks, but also a much bigger riddle: the artist himself.

The show is an interesting collection as a whole; a mixture of different ways in which to see things, clever little tricks of the eye to make you look twice and doubt yourself, and a result, really pay some attention to the works hanging on the wall. It almost seems as if Caramazza's personality lurks somewhere in between the carefully painted origami structures or trompe l'oeil blu-tack. His quirks, his aims, his personality behind the paint so to speak, could have been translated onto canvases to convey a sense of self.

At best,The Astronomer (After Vermeer) is one of Caramazza's most striking pieces. Not only is there a evident display of his physical skill in his ability to recreate this classic, but also his talent at skewering perspectives and challenging the viewer to see things in a different way. It's almost as if breaking these images down has breathed life into these classics by making them more accessible and contemporary.

However, it's a shame that there aren't more solid pieces such as The Astronomer and After Constable, Landscape with Double Rainbow (Travelling Light Heavy Baggage) in the collection. It is these paintings that really show off Caramazza's best side and despite the range of styles adopted, from Constable to Mondrian, there isn't enough fluidity within the pieces as whole for the collection to mesh together and make sense.

The rest of the show sadly failed to impress in the same way or make any impact upon me, and I was left feeling confused at certain pieces, trompe l'oeil though they may be.Lot 648 merely showed an unimaginative visual of 'correction fluid' rather than any skill behind it.

However, I admire Caramazza for his diversity of styles. For exploring and experimenting the ways in which he can work in and trying his hand at methods that are so strikingly different. It can take a lot to be brave and take chances. His skill and talent are evident, but by having such a varied and mismatched collection, it failed to win me over despite the clever trickery.

Filippo Caramazza's 'Flutes of Impossible Shepherds' is at Hales Gallery, 7 Bethnal Green Road, E1 6LA, until 13th February.

Louise Collins

My experience of looking at Filippo Caramazza's work in The Flutes of Impossible Shepherds exhibition, was of a deep contemplation that did not transgress or transform into an order of understanding, but instead retained its reflective form. Rather than pushing me towards definitive states of being or seeing, these works didn't seem to settle, but rather prompted a thought-space that self-reflexively examined itself; a state of mind that is conducive to new perception.

In this, though the skill of rendering familiar Matisse's, Picasso's, Velasquez's is therefore impressive - as for example in A wall in Naples-Studio wall - the excitement of Caramazza's work, for me, is as a philosophical generator.

He uses masterpieces and fragments of masterpieces as props for progressive thinking. Their familiarity, certified values and ledgers on our timelines, make them great symbols for an established system of values, and this can be quickly frustrated. There was some similarity to Magritte: A wall in Naples-Studio wall, for example, was resonant of Magritte's frame pictures, similarly testing the impulse for narrative whilst making a post-structuralist critique of representation; a painting of a postcard of a Picasso, next to a painting of a postcard of a Constable, taped as a collective with painted tape: not Picasso's or Constable's or postcards at all. Caramazza however shows how these images are loaded in contemporary terms - the radicalism of Cubism, for example, now contained by historical linearity - and through juxtaposition he deconstructs chronology, allowing cross-pollination by taking away our categories and, by this, re-opening the challenge of moving beyond well-established limits in thought.

When the same act is made to text, Caramazza's challenge is perhaps more explicit. Whilst origami shapes of Vermeer (The Astronomer (After Vermeer)) re-form and re-assert the experience of looking, the shaping of text through transfers and white-out obviously reconfigured its reading. I liked these pieces particularly: re-fashioned descriptive catalogue pages now placed with different masterpieces as in Lot 49, Peter and the Goats. The text, in being whitened out and added to, could be read from left to right and top to bottom; and letters picked out, spelling 'GIOTTO', hearts drawn around 'amor', spelt out a new utility in the text: poetry, almost, and sentiment, as the product of a re-reading of reading.

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