Diego Cirulli – Hollow @ BC Gallery

“Hollow”, presenting the recent paintings of Diego Cirulli, on view at BC Gallery in Berlin through July 9th, 2016 (Wed-Sat, 1-6 pm), is the artist’s first solo exhibition in Europe. Although conceived independently in Buenos Aires, Argentina during 2015 and the first half of 2016, as a whole the works reveal loss and the struggle to fill the emptiness inside, an overwhelming experience of the void, manifested in solitude or together with others, in memory and in the everyday life, a feeling so accurately translated on canvas as if emerging before us.

The artist takes the viewer through darkness and light, from the first signs of despair to the nesting of unease and depression, and also conveys a sense of nothingness which may actually become liberating by pretending not to see the hole and by refusing the evidence of a constantly growing gap. It is interesting how Diego Cirulli blurs the identity of the depicted characters, thus amplifying the uncertainty or threat surrounding them, while their stillness shows the inability to react or likeliness to behave absurdly when confronted with privation.

“Hollow is the pictorial materialization of what has become void and what remains. What speaks through silence, what stands through denying. What slips away and can only be expressed through aphonic sounds. Appearance and nonappearance. Presence and absence. What lies within and behind each image. While painting, Cirulli finds himself face to face with an affirmation. Something beyond his intentions. He can but endure the absence of what he is looking for and accept the gaze of the painting. This does not end there; it is filled with something that overflows. There the will arises.” (BC Gallery)