8th MOVEMENT (Projections Collection)

Relationships and feelings are the musical score we live by, and in the years 1988-1989, my experience sought guiding geometries, almost like musical scores directing an exciting period of new discoveries (I was 43/44). Light and space guided me in the second half of my life. I called the collection Projections, because they accompany us throughout our existence, both within ourselves and towards others.
Work exhibited in 1989 in the solo exhibition at Palazzo Valentini, catalogue with introduction by Dario Micacchi and Alfio Borghese.
In 1989, I felt the desire to renew the way I had applied paint, which until then I had done by applying a coat of plastic quartz either on canvas or on wood, to go beyond the similarity with the wall surfaces that had attracted me so much for their dimensional and expressive potential.
I want to return to the brushstroke, but also to an iconography different from the figurative (previous series, even if worked in an unusual way).
The moment was expanding. I wanted to focus my attention on a geometric dimension, to highlight the directions I wanted to take, within a framework of openings: the dimension of the theater wings immediately took center stage, and I began with a series structured along these lines: a space revealed in its interweavings between two opening planes. Along with the lines—which had substance—I sensed numerous interweavings fluctuating, as if for feeling and living, but within a powerful dimension of luminosity. An interweaving of axes and planes differently oriented like the paths we formally and internally encounter in life. The choice was therefore to orient myself toward a yellow dominant—specifically, I used Hansa Yellow light—which perfectly matched the luminous emotions I was representing.
In this work, the wings are narrower than in previous canvases—sometimes I've done without them—and the color green marks a visual as well as a physical separation. I imagine I could stand there, exit, extricate myself, move, or re-enter... to prepare subsequent scenes... as any viewer might do before the canvas.
I exhibited this canvas in a solo show at Palazzo Valentini in December 1989, when it was still possible to display it in the magnificent ancient cellars. The catalog includes comments by art critic Dario Micacchi and journalist Alfio Borghese. Here are excerpts:
Excerpt by Dario Micacchi:
“Giuseppe Scelfo, in painting, starts from an idea that is a dominant, lyrically obsessive thought that possesses his imagination until it has exhausted all its significant constructive possibilities.
It can be figurative as in the cycle with the “Caryatids” (FRAGMENTS) or in that of Antigone; or abstract neo-constructivist like the latest one of the Movements.
In the early 1980s, the color was applied with a mural-like effect. The medium was acrylic on plastic quartz; a material that lasted until the most recent paintings, when oil was added, making the luminosity of the image and its details more softly blended, more radiant, and more magical, softening the sharpness of the geometry.
It is a higher level reached with the exploration of space operated with the cycle of large and small format movements (and here a new lyricism is maturing which, to use a musical term, could be called “allegretto scherzondo”).
And it is also a higher pictorial level because the occupation of space tends towards the long duration of human time of spatial domination so serene and constructive.
Giuseppe Scelfo, as a painter, possesses a singular eye that operates in a 360-degree manner, looking into the depths of space and the depths of the self with absolute harmony and symmetry: so much so that the serene image of spatial conquest and domination is also evidence of a growth path of the profound self from a closed situation to the blue openness.
Giuseppe Scelfo has given himself the right culture and technique for these image conquests of his, so deviant from the official but habitual course of today's painting".

Excerpt from Alfio Borghese:
“…In order to evoke fantastic spaces, Scelfo does not follow mathematical rules and creates projections when he needs them, to always obtain an expansion of space.
His is a contemporary painting and even the use of acrylic is due to the modernity of the technique, which gives a compact surface, homogeneous tonal variations with faster execution.
1989 marked a turning point in Scelfo's painting; first, he abandoned classical themes, accompanied by a shift in technique from plastic quartz to acrylic directly on canvas, rediscovering the pleasure of fluid brushstrokes, transcending his connection with murals, and moving beyond the "picture plane."
Now, the conversation is direct, the surface no longer needs to be “screened,” the drawing is conceived on everyday images, on assembly and traced directly onto the canvas.
With the MOVEMENTS, Scelfo enters the fantastic climate of emotions, setting all his plays of colors, of lines (of the many lives he would love to live) in complete freedom of themes and figures.
The search for spatiality is linked to an exploration of light and the transparency of nodes; projections, the intersections of lines and planes play the main role.
From the MOVEMENTS Scelfo draws infinite VARIATIONS, which give rise to the PROJECTIONS cycle: the colours are now toned down, the brightness increases and he begins to explore the sensitivity, poetry and ambiguity of transparencies and intersections and the body of works from 1989 sees the rhythm of large and small surfaces, especially with the last works which he also begins to execute in oil”.

The transaction takes place with maximum security for both the seller and the buyer. We take care of the conformity (provenance, authenticity, state of conservation) of the work and handle the shipping.
Returns are possible no later than 14 days after receiving the order.