Felice Varini

28.11.2019 – 15.02.2020

Felice Varini (Locarno, Switzerland, 1952) uses architectural space and everything that it comprises as his field of action. Architecture is the original medium of his oeuvre; he works in situ, adapting to it and creating a body of work that bears in mind all its elements: materials, history, function and environment. Based on this information, he sets a specific vantage point in the space from which his intervention takes form.

This vantage point is located at eye level and preferably runs along an inevitable route from which he encourages us to stop and look.

His painting appears before us as we travel along this path and find the precise spot where Varini wants to take us. If we move, the work changes; it is never the same, forming almost infinite perspectives and figures. Reality is never changed, erased or modified; that part of his work interests him and seduces him in all its complexity.

In his practice, we can distinguish two opposite phenomena. First, the projections on the surface applied to the space, and later painted with this same form, and secondly, the role of the observer who experiences these forms spatially. What we see is a painting that emerges freely from the space, like an intelligible kaleidoscope of fragments that plays with our perception, which at first appears to be an orderly web of lines but the next instant disintegrates into fragments.

For the first time In Madrid, Felice presents an exhibition in which we can see the “re-actualisation”, as he calls it, of some of his most representative works.

In this case, he takes as a reference everyday, useful objects like a hat, a mirror and a piano, and based on them he creates the form of his work, freely developing it around these objects. A different dynamic between the observer and the object is created in each of these pieces, leading to new perspectives and ways of appreciating them.