Salvatore Emblema

Naples, Italy, 1929 - 2006.

Working on the idea of the canvas as a survey about architecture and landscape, both raised to visual perception. He has looked for its stylistic coherence also for the works that did not have a painting as the final aim. In his earth / environmental paintings, Emblema achieved transparency through pictorial interventions on the landscape itself. In 1967 he started applying paint created from organic raw pigments directly on a stretched jute canvas whose transparency let the landscape draw itself through the fabric; or with the same goal through metallic colored nets, suspended in the natural and architectural space. Works where transparency ceases to be a perspective gap obtained exasperating the surface of the jute but becomes a visual category. A filter through which is possible to frame pieces of real space and to expand it in depth dimension.
Eric van Hove grew up in Cameroun and in Brussels. His work includes wanderlust, defamiliarization, and psychogeography; he accepted very early the transcendentalist influences trying to oppose a more spiritual and decentralized approach to the Eurocentric intellectualism of the contemporary art world. Eric van Hove’s sculptures are hybrids of different cultural and social contexts through which the artist explores the aesthetic and metaphorical territory in between craft and capitalist production, regional and global. By blending artisanal work with mass-produced objects, Van Hove creates elaborated artworks embodying the contradictory nature of contemporary material and visual culture and its paradoxical socio-economic implications.