Basement Paintings

Olve Sande’s fourth solo show with Ciaccia Levi, and first in the Milan space, is an investigation of the relation between painting, architecture, and site.

To paint is traditionally to replace the physical reality with an illusory one, to suppress the physicality of the support (the wall, the stretcher, the canvas) through layer upon layer of painterly material.

In these works the painted canvas acts as a filter, a skin, negotiating how much of the physical reality of the support is let through. They are made with the persistent presence of the underlying support; the abrasive handling of paint is like rubbing against skin, locating the bones of the substructure, gradually developing an imprint of reality. The works appear as patches of skin reminding of the body they were removed from — that is the architectural space in which these originated: the basement as a place with little connection to the outside, a kind of illusionary space, mirroring and extending the function of the painted surface.

The process of building a stretcher is a past memory. Covered by the opaque canvas, most of it is forgotten. Then, through painting, the memory is slowly recovered. Every layer of paint thickens the skin: the thicker the painted canvas becomes, less details come through, like the effect of time on memory; the thinner canvas, where the painting is resolved sooner, like any resolved memory, is more true to the bones. And as the memory is worked and reworked upon, again and again, in the end it is almost entirely a figment of the imagination.