Ashes To Ashes: The Paintings of Fulvio Di Piazza
From funeral services to the famed David Bowie song to a British sci-fi series, the phrase “ashes to ashes” takes on a new strain of meaning with every use. With Fulvio di Piazza’s recent show at Jonathan LeVine Gallery in New York, this metaphoric 360-degree view of life is reimagined once again. Ashes to Ashes depicts smoldering scenes with anthropomorphic detail. Faces appear against mountain ranges as though built from twisted kindling that has been charred to varying degrees. Plumes of smoke billow from all corners of the paintings and embers shoot out from eyes and mouths. In Di Piazza’s images, the world is both built and consumed by ash.
Palermo-based artist Di Piazza was working on his painting “Uomo Nero”—centered around a wonderfully grim face with blazing irises that rise to form thick clouds of smoke that double as eyebrows—when he stumbled across a copy of economist Jeremy Rifkin’s controversial book Entropy in his father-in-law’s library. The author’s grasp of entropy and thermodynamics has often been questioned, but the artist appreciated Rifkin’s
philosophical interpretation of the second law of thermodynamics on a metaphoric level. “We are nothing and earth [does] not belong to us,” he explains through a translated email. “I mean this in the sense that man, with his idea of progress, does not consider that his actions have a devastating burden on the balance of nature,” says Di Piazza.
For Di Piazza, this manifested in the ashen scenes that were forming on his canvases. He was searching for something that he saw missing in daily life, “natural energy” as opposed to the energy that, he says, “man tries to produce daily in the name of progress that, in our case, means destruction.” Soon after, he heard David Bowie’s hit, “Ashes to Ashes,” piping through the radio and all the pieces of inspiration he needed for the show, including the title, were in place.
…the city of Palermo is the perfect mix between sunlight and darkness.”
In some ways, Di Piazza’s work is influenced by his own environment. Although he was born in Syracuse, Sicily, Di Piazza was raised and continues to reside in Palermo. He describes the ancient city as a “melting pot,” pointing to the Norman-Arab-Byzantine culture that shaped much of the city’s architecture and design.
“You can still see in Palermo how many wonderful examples of Arabian architectural buildings survived, especially against the terrible concrete invasion,” he says. He’s talking about the boom of building developments that began in the 1970s, but haven’t quite erased his hometown’s history. “Palermo is the perfect mix between sunlight and darkness,” he says. That incredibly tense relationship between progress and the beauty it threatens to swallow whole is reflected consistently in Di Piazza’s work.
A graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Urbino, Italy, Di Piazza has shown his work regularly since the mid-1990s. He has thirteen solo shows under his belt, primarily with galleries in his home country, and has participated in numerous group shows. Ashes to Ashes was his first solo effort in New York, his second in the United States. (He showed in Los Angeles back in 2008.)
Nature has long been a focus in Di Piazza’s work, but the natural world as seen through this artist’s eyes has taken many turns throughout his career. Di Piazza describes his earliest pieces as “full of light” and rich with color. “They were with an ironic and joyful nature,” he adds. Color was always key, the idea being that the audience would be hit by the hue before getting lost in what he calls a “labyrinth of the vegetation.” His earlier work was dense with lush plant life. There are pieces, like his 2003 painting “Ficus,” where nearly every speck of the canvas is covered with flora, where it takes more than quick glance to notice a human-like form camouflaged amidst the greenery. But Di Piazza had a sudden urge to shake up a style that had been working out quite well for him. The thick forests he built began to crumble. Images of a world in ruins crept into the scenes, the battered branches and sooty shades of black and gray mixed with the bold oranges and reds of fire and lava. Di Piazza needed his fantasy world to decay so that he could rebuild the narratives within it.
I mean this in the sense that man, with his idea of progress, does not consider that his actions have a devastating burden on the balance of nature…”
He spent six months at work on Ashes to Ashes. The challenge was capturing the essence of a substance as fine to the touch as ash. Di Piazza studied a photo of a volcanic ash-covered landscape until he arrived at the perfect color palette. In “Uomo Nero,” the first piece he tackled in the series, he used his own face as the basis for the visage amidst the ruins. The final image made Di Piazza think of “the god of the catastrophe.”
“That could be a metaphor of human ignorance,” he says, “but that’s just my interpretation.”
There’s a sense of mystery in Di Piazza’s work, a constant need for the viewer to try to discern the origins of this intense world he has created. He says that he tries to take his audience to “a dimension between the real and the unreal.” His work bridges sublime fantasy art with a sort of open-ended social commentary in a constantly evolving universe that is never pinned down to a particular period of time.*
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