Can you tell me a little bit about you?
I am based in a small city in the middle of Italy. I did my BA in Visual Arts in Venice at IUAV, and then my MA in Painting at Royal Academy of Antwerp in Belgium.
When did you first discover art, or realize you wanted to make it yourself?
Since I have memories, I was drawing.
What do you like most about working where you do?
I like working in small city, with no stress caused by the frenetic life of big capitals. Here I can afford a nice studio space with natural sun light, perfect for paintings. And of course a nice quality of life.
What ideas are you exploring in your practice?
The painted canvases present themselves as frames of rituals and gestures of the spirit without time. They tell the genesis and the history of ideas and objects that are able to survive the passing of time, sedimenting in reality as fragments of a not-far past. These objects are in an under-painted space where their function become ambiguous; they’re traces of the human attempt to communicate with an upper reality, tools of traditions, faith, and different cultures, able to synthetize their world, a spiritual dimension which belongs to a collective subconscious. The painted scenes are intimate and private moments that shatter at a first glance: in the same moment that we try to recognize the presences, those become empty, losing the specificity of their narration, but they are filled with new signs, with new traces that become universal, losing the specific coordinates of space and time.
What is your process like?
I work only with oil. It takes me a long time for a piece to be done. I don’t start from pictures, and instead I start to build what I have in mind, and then step by step I cover something or I add something. It depends on what the paintings need. It is important for me the feeling that the scene must have. And to achieve this I use different ideas in painting: I don’t like to work or make paintings in series, each one similar to the next one. My aim is to break every time the rule or the idea that I had, in the paintings, so that something new can happen.
Do you have a day job or other work that you split your time between?
I paint every day from 4 to 6 hours only in the morning and early afternoon.
What is your studio like?
It’s a 60 square meters space. It was the stable of the house in 1800, so it’s in the garden, and I worked on it to turn it into a studio space. Just with windows in the ceiling it was perfect.
How significant has attending art school been on your practice?
Attending my MA at Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp has been crucial for me. I had the chance and the time to work on my paintings every in a nice studio space. It was perfect.
What are you working on right now?
I just opened a group show in Milan with Galleria Continua in a historical space.
I had the chance to show a lot of new paintings in a really evocative room and I designed also the carpet of the room, to create a specific environment.
Find more at alessandrofogo.tumblr.com and on Instagram @fogo.alessandro!
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