Diana Lowenstein Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition by international artists Loris Cecchini (Italy) and Dirk Salz (Germany) from November 2rd, 2018 through January 1st, 2019.

In the work of Loris Cecchini (born in Milan, 1969), photography, drawing, sculpture and installation combine to form a unified poetics, the cardinal element of which is transfiguration. The variety and morphology of the elements constantly interrelate in a continuous alternating process of deconstruction and reconstruction located in the interchange between the physical reality of the materials and a virtualized presence.

Incorporating elements from various interdisciplinary fields from chemistry to groundbreaking technologies, his work playfully investigates the limits of creation generating a continuous detection of exciting art outcomes whose definitions are ever changing.

Biological metaphor and motion represent core philosophies behind the artist’s investigation and fundamental basis in his projects. Cecchini has continuously introduced the concept of the organic element as a central element of his work, in part as an exploration of the idea of the object and its inherent materiality but also as a minimalist practice. Acting with the lens of a scientist, Cecchini closely examines his modules initially starting with basic 3D or watercolor studies moving forward toward the particularity of natural elements Cecchini’s module-based installations, a calculated chain of stainless steel elements originating from his preliminary inquiries again using organism, as a leitmotif in his work to address the intricate evolution of art in relation to sciences. In a wide range of works, Cecchini join together his steel modules to form a semblance of climbing plants, corals or crystals structures, organically deriving in an array of bewildering trails contrasting the deliberate intention of the propagation.

…”These paintings – if we may simply refer to pieces by Dirk Salz (Born 1962 in Bochum, Germany) as “paintings” – actually do indicate a very real depth. It results from the specific painting material that Salz has been using for years now. His painting method does not have much in common with the traditional notion of applying paint with a brush to a picture carrier such as canvas, wood, or paper. Instead he distributes a certain number (or none at all) of more or less thick layers of epoxy resin enriched with paint pigments upon multiplex boards, occasionally also aluminum, and generally primed in black. Epoxy resin is a transparent material. This has the effect that the gaze actually penetrates the picture, traversing a real spatial depth of several millimeters. But the spatial depth that is experienced visually often extends far beyond this. Epoxy resin not only has a transparent character, when drying it also forms a hard, for the most part smooth, surface that strongly reflects the light.

This now means that a gaze to Dirk Salz’s works takes in and must deal with contradictory visual data: the partly real, partly virtual color depth of space that coincides with the reflections on the surface, whose intensity and information content inevitably depend on the spatial situation and the persons and objects who are also in the respective room, the light situation, and the vantage point of the viewer.