Antonio Carena - Sky cladding

This work is truly significant in the research of an original artist like Antonio Carena. The "sky" is the primary subject of his work, but Carena's vision isn't the firmament above our heads; rather, it's a reflection of the technological society we live in. Carena had this insight when he noticed how the sky, reflected by the body of a car, took on a completely different appearance than that of phenomenal reality. His research begins from this point and develops into an investigation into the reproduction of nature as perceived by our senses but filtered through technology. This also involves other emblematic themes of contemporary art, such as those related to the so-called "poetics of the object," that is, the recontextualization of waste materials from industrial society and the use of unusual media and techniques in the creation of artworks.

From this premise, for Antonio Carena, reproducing the sky does not mean abstracting something he perceives with his senses, as happens in traditional painting. Rather, it means creating something new and concrete, making use of technological tools and relying on his artistic touch. For this reason, he uses techniques such as airbrushing or nitro paint, as in this case, to create a representation that is deliberately unnatural, a technological, almost mechanical artifact. In this particular work, we can see how, in some specific cases, the creation of his skies led him to a more specific investigation of light. Indeed, the use of nitro paint creates, on the support, a sort of nebula, a dazzling halo that engulfs and dissolves everything in the light. However, everything, once again, is produced according to the mechanical process, which embodies a perfectly natural phenomenon, that of fading into light.

Antonio Carena was born in Rivoli in 1925 and passed away in 2010. Known as the "painter of the skies," he was one of the leading figures of Italian pop and informal art. A graduate of the Albertina Academy of Fine Arts in Turin, from the painting school of Enrico Paulucci and Mario Davico, he exhibited at the 25th Venice Biennale in 1950. His early object-based research (Carrozzerie from 1963; Pellicole and Trance metalliche from 1964) was exhibited in 1965 at the Galleria Sperone in Turin and the Galleria Scipione in Macerata. His early Cieli from 1965, airbrushed on canvas, the Levitazioni from 1969-70, and the Scritte from 1971 have been exhibited in solo exhibitions in various Italian galleries. Since 1993, he has taught painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cuneo. He has decorated numerous public and private buildings with Cielo inserts.

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