Federico Romero Bayter by Hay Hill Gallery

Mauro Federico Romero Bayter

Exhibition 2nd February - 29th February 2016

Mazzacurati Fine Art C.so Martiri della Libertà 75 Ferrara Italy in collaboration with Hay Hyll Gallery 35 Baker Street London W1U 8EN Curator Vittoria Coen Roberto Mazzacurati Mazzacurati Fine Art’s Director +39 347 482 0312 robiarte59@gmail.com Mikhail Zaitsev Hay Hyll Gallery’s Director +44 (0) 20 74 86 6006 +44 (0) 20 79 35 5315 mikhail@hayhyllgallery.com

Printed January 2016

Mauro Federico Romero Bayter

Urban Labyrinths Vittoria Coen Federico Romero Bayter was born in Colombia, he studied at the Accademia di Brera in Milan and he now lives in Genoa, a city which is as mythical as it is fascinating due to its closeness to the sea and its rich history. The artist combines both the Latin American and the Italian culture in a rich polyphony of colours, suggestions and signs. As he himself declares he “started drawing when he was born” and took in the love for art from his family. In the two “worlds” he has lived in he recognizes the affinity of passions and religious spirituality. Those two worlds with their contradictions dominate his work where they miraculously merge in dynamic lines which give evidence of his determined use of the paintbrush. So everything starts with the drawing (he calls them “project drawings”); fast signs which step by step, crossing one another and pleated with each other, outline a tangle of building lines which reinvent the perception of cities, buildings, streets. Bayter’s urban landscapes are real visions which, however fixed they may be on the canvas, due to the many details still lead the observer to believe he may be watching a film. There is extraordinary movement in these images which take pictures of the history and of the dream of the artist, uniting inventive talent and architectural precision in symbiotic brotherhood. They are places turned into non-places the very moment Bayter reinvents the nature of the city, with its squares, its bridges, its lights and its 4

shadows (the aura of artistic objects, in these cases architecture, and the aura of natural objects, described by Benjamin, as for example the skies which are not backgrounds but artistic creations in Bayter’s work). It has happened to many, I imagine, to find themselves standing in Piazza San Marco in Venice at night with water flooding the pavement and creating an extraordinary mirroring effect. The church Santa Maria della Salute and the buildings around are above our eyes and beneath our feet. Also just watching the drawings of this artist we already find all this, matter and signs, which are further amplified in the oil drawings of which this exhibition with recent and most recent works gives extraordinary testimony. A chapter which is worth looking at in more detail is the one related to cities (London, New York, Istanbul...) created this year where flags and coats of arms of the countries which the cities belong to and which Federico Romero Bayter creates his paintings on emerge in skies ripped open by chromatic sparkling effects. So there is recognition, a sense of belonging, of identification of places even though these places are then reinvented and interpreted by the artist. Bright colours like red, green, blue heat up the atmosphere, already dense with signs and labyrinths which mark out his work, and tear the horizon apart. They are powerful works in his usual decisive style which does not leave anything to chance.

Themes connected to the geography of the world come to mind, which in contemporary art are represented by some of the most interesting artists on an international scale, with the main interest not being put on stylistic affinity but on the importance which the representation of the flag has had in order to convey ideas and poetics. We think of the multiplication and the overlapping of the American flag in the late 50s by Japser Johns, a kind of ready-made sui generis in the light of New Dada, or the Tricolour Block of Salvo, or the wellknown Maps di Alighiero Boetti, tapestries representing the geography of the countries by means of their flags, works which re-draw the world. In art geography becomes geopolitics where the flag is not anymore the proud, rhetoric, and symbolic expression of a nation’s power, like in the realistic art of certain totalitarian regimes, but it can insinuate the question of where we belong to, it can become a brand similar to the way Coca Cola is famous as a brand name for a drink, or to Warhol’s Campbell’s, or to Esso by Schifano; but the flag can also epitomize – and that is what it does in Bayter in my view – the striving for an open and simultaneous view of the various identities. Starting from his studies, in his world we feel the breath of Giacometti’s paintings, of the chromatic contortions of El Greco, of the black and whites of Kiefer, some of the artists most cherished by Bayter... Despite their lightness and airiness his works succeed in being densely packed with matter which transforms into vital energy, perfectly in line

with the passionate dynamic the artist puts into his search. Painting certainly is a medium, which, however, allows getting to the heart of a coherent and continuously evolving journey. Bayter does not make use of the so-called new technologies, but he faces space directly with the tools he has got: his thoughts and his hands. It is, indeed, not usual that an artist today, at a point in time when digital cameras and computer programmes seem to have replaced the component of making which is so much richer in terms of history, needs to compare with methods which in my view often rather succumb to a “trend”, allowing a more comfortable approach. As if we were faced with a school, with an ideology which disdains the pure idea of painting and prefers the readymade, maybe depriving the most prominent vanguard artists of the 20th century of their work and inspiration by modifying it in new packaging, in a more “up-to-date” one, a term which theoretically should not be allowed a lot of space in art. And then there are the artists who courageously “get dirty” when facing the structural and technical problems which turn up every day when working with materials like oil, wood or iron. These two worlds sometimes do not seem to communicate at all; the non-existing dialogue just weakens the value of art and culture, its libertarian and liberating character. Nowadays, when theoretically anything can be made, the system of art ﬁnds itself bridled in stylistic groups and in prejudices, not much less so than at the times of the beginning Informal Movement in the Second Postwar period when anyone who would paint a form which might resemble a real tree was

accused of fogydom. Today, on the contrary, criticism tends to define the form of the informal – doing so they are 60 years late – but revising the past unfortunately is no method to understand the present. Let me quote the title of an exhibition by Federico Romero Bayter “interpreting” Ferrara: we can and we must always speak of interpretations in terms of anything referring to knowledge and organized knowledge. Bayter is an artist of his time in every respect; with him paintings become tridimensional, architectural, perspective space. The vitalism of what he is doing is transmitted without veil, without complicated or solipsistic motivation. Obviously his deeper ego is constantly present and he continues his research, but the numerous signs of acceptance he has been gaining in Italy and beyond prove him right. By including all kind of places and nations his work seems to comprise the entirety of the world, yet outlining and stressing specific differences. And this is the best way of being an artist in search of their ideal beauty.

The way home Barbara Di Gregorio Another artist might have declared the work finished, but for de Kooning it was nothing but the beginning. “On countless occasions”, Elaine wrote, “I lived through the familiar yet agonizing experience of coming home to find a painting, which had been precious to me, destroyed.” Elaine de Kooning There are no shutters, no blinds, and no curtains on the windows of the studio. The only barrier between outside and inside are the window panes - often wide open, for the paintings dry more quickly with air coming in – and grates painted white, which seem to keep the painter imprisoned on rainy days. Today it is raining; it has been raining for three days, three nights which he has spent at the studio, three days of faded milky light which distorts colours and forms: the eyes give in easily, months of efforts flatten on the canvas, it is impossible to paint, a torture to watch. Since when he arrived the painter has only been able to turn the draft of the painting he has been working on for too long by now from the wall towards him. This painting is completely wrong: even if there was any possibility to get it right without passing a coat of white over it and start anew, without doubt working on it in today’s mean light would only make everything worse. He would almost be happy if he could go home and enjoy the storm and the fog from his armchair near the chimney. The woman keeps sending him pictures on his cell phone of the first fire 8

lit in this early autumn; she takes pictures of biscuits and a cup of tea, the reflection of the orange flames on the carpet where they could be making love, her own face, stretched into an incredibly sad caricature, because she knows that today’s light is not a good one for painting and she does not understand what the painter might be doing on his own in his damned studio. Well, he is not doing anything but feeling resentful while every few minutes changing his position in the battered swivel armchair which is the only chair in the room. The pictures she keeps sending him are pointless, sloppy, yet painfully genuine compared to anything he has ever painted in all his life; the stains and bubbles of humidity on the walls, his shoelaces, the cotton weft of his coveralls he has put on for work in vain, the deep furrows in the palms of his clean hands: everything is a better image than his pictures today, everything would be worthier dedicating one’s lifetime to paint it, even if it only means to finally get a not utterly indecent approximation to it; everything stimulates him, makes his fingers quiver as well as a small part of his soul, ultimately annoying him though, while the bunch of paintbrushes stays unmoved two metres further away like a black outline of the Hydra against the bleached windows. It is always this way when it rains and he cannot work. When he has his hands tied by the rain for too long a time – this very rain, as said before, has been pouring down for seventy-two hours – the poisonous thoughts, which he eradicates by painting every day, germinate inside him and make bad blood. Another reason why he cannot go home to the woman waiting for him next to the chimney: today he detests himself, and when he detests himself, he obviously finishes up detesting

everybody and being detestable to everybody including mother brother fiancée and friends. Without hope for the sky to brighten up any moment the only way to avoid remorse is to keep waiting. In the meantime he reflects – against his will – and scrutinizes – against his will – the canvases piled up at every wall awaiting the two expositions scheduled for next month. Somewhere somebody once wrote about his ability to paint the light which is inherent in every human being by way of urban spectra stripped of any signs of human life. Nice words, these, but he has never taken them seriously: in moments like this he doubts his abilities as a painter, and it seems to him that even the large paintings, which help him pay for food and rent, have been printed by day light, and all he could do was add some black blots. Light is the artist, he is nothing but a paintbrush – a paintbrush of minor quality; as if this was not enough, by watching his work of the previous months he is getting more and more to the conclusion that he must have been trembling like a child throughout the whole time it took him to complete it. The dozens of city labyrinths around him are about to collapse upon him and they might bury him forever. The painter pulls himself together and finally stands up from the swivel chair. He slaps his leg, which had gone to sleep, longer than necessary, he closes his drawing table, he pushes the cart where he keeps his colours on into a corner and starts to spread the dozens of canvases, piled one upon the other at the walls, on the floor forming a gigantic mosaic. Then he steps onto the armchair and stands there with his arms spread like a tightrope walker, settling in a shaky balance. The upholstered armchair continues to move beneath him like the anchor of the lookout

tower on a mast in a storm: the painter gazes at his future exhibitions from above, at length, defeated, and he doesn’t see absolutely anything which he would deem worthy of at least some friendly words of encouragement if it was a colleague’s work. About half an hour goes by, then he gets off the armchair and starts carrying all the paintings into the entrance hall of the studio. Breathing has become a little easier now. He takes a scraper, bends over and starts to scrape off the vacant floor month-old drops of varnish which have dropped off his paintbrush and dried. He only stops when the scraper’s blade slides across the perfectly clean marble without encountering any hitches. He sweeps up the tiny scales of varnish arranging them into a shiny heap with the dustpan. He then scatters them on the floor again and shuffles them with the tip of his toes. He circles around them, taking photographs from various angles, then, disappointedly, gathers them again and throws them into the dustbin. He fills a bucket with water and ammoniac, soaks a cloth. He clears the drawing table and cleans every bit of it with a cloth soaked in alcohol; he carefully examines the sheets, piling up those which need further elaboration and stuffing all the others into a big folder. He dusts sculptures, snack bowls, drawings, pictures in frames and all the other objects, which he has been given by former lovers and friends; he then rearranges them on the shelves but only after having polished them with alcohol as well. The window panes, still wet, die away in the shade of the evening, the woman at home calls him mournfully on his mobile phone while he sacrifices his toothbrush to clean the baseboard crusted with black. Using white paint he provides for the spots of varnish to disappear from

the walls, he climbs onto a ladder to remove the cobwebs from the vaults of the enormous ceiling, he washes the cans he uses to mix water and Indian ink with washing-up liquid first, then with lemon, until they look like sparkling soap bubbles in file on the window sill where the rain is still visible from. As he takes back the paintings from the entrance hall to the studio, they seem a little less hostile. It might be due to the electric lighting, which has replaced the rainy white from outside immediately after nightfall. Tentatively the painter approaches the last painting, the disastrous draft which he has kept turned towards the wall for days, and even this one captures him, against expectation, absorbs him like a lover with its pure lines. Yes, now he can go home: but first he wants to finish painting the road at least, the sky above, a mixture of exploding stars and darkness, the shadows on the cobbles, the buildings which create these shadows, and a very specific window, just slightly less black than all the others due to the first autumn fire which keeps crackling for him in the chimney. When he closes the front door, it is past nine o’clock. The woman expects him cross-armed. ‘Have you been painting at least?’ she asks him, blatantly angry, violently chopping two innocent tomatoes on a wooden board. ‘Sure.’ ‘In this white rain light?’ ‚That’s exactly why I’m so late.‘ ‘I don’t believe a single word’, she protests. ‘Where have you been? With whom?’ She is chopping the tomatoes forcefully now as if wanting to 10

slaughter an animal until she ends up with a gash in her thumb. The woman curses very loudly, and when she resumes talking she is deﬁnitely furious. ‘I don’t believe you have been painting’, she screams. ‘Do as you like’, he says and comes closer; he takes her bleeding hand, examines the cut and the trickle of red varnish ﬂowing down till her elbow, then he looks for some skin-coloured pink to correct both of them as she keeps ranting and raving while working busily in the kitchen.

Works

London 1 2015 oil on canvas 150 x 200 cm

London 2 2015 oil on canvas 150 x 200 cm

London 3 2015 oil on canvas 150 x 200 cm

Genova 1 2015 oil on canvas 150 x 200 cm

London 4 2015 oil on canvas 150 x 200 cm

London 5 2014 oil on canvas 150 x 200 cm

London 6 2014 oil on canvas 200 x 220 cm

New York 1 2015 oil on canvas 200 x 300 cm

London 7 2014 oil on canvas 150 x 200 cm

London 8 2014 oil on canvas 150 x 200 cm

London 9 2015 oil on canvas 220 x 200 cm

Parigi 1 2014 oil on canvas 100 x 120 cm

London 10 2015 oil on canvas 150 x 100 cm

London 11 2015 oil on canvas 100 x 130 cm

New York 2 2015 oil on canvas 100 x 150 cm

London 12 2015 oil on canvas 120 x 120 cm

London 2014 oil on canvas 140 x 280 cm

London 2015 oil on canvas 140 x 280 cm

London 13 2016 oil on canvas 150 x 200 cm

Biography

Mauro Federico Romero Bayter born in Colombia, graduated and passed with distinction at the Accademia di Brera in 2006. He lives and works in Genova

Solo exhibitions

2014 | Extèrieurs, Galleria Sifrein Paris, text by Santiago Gamboa 2014 | Vette Urbane, Galleria Hofburg -Kompatscher Bressanone 2014 | Percezione # Paesaggio, RezArte Contemporanea, Reggio Emilia, text by Vittoria Coen 2013 | A Torino, Dajago Magazzino Culturale, Torino 2012 | Pintura, Galleria R. Rotta Farinelli Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Genova 2012 | Penombra, Chiesa di San Rocco a Carnago, Varese 2011 | Caprichos, Galleria Federico Rui, Milano 2010 | Tecnica mixta, Galleria R. Rotta Farinelli Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Genova 2009 | Amaneceres, Galleria Nuovo Spazio, Piacenza by Emanuele Beluﬃ 2009 | Dibujos y pinturas, Galleria Roberto Rotta Farinelli Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Genova, a cura di Vladek Cwalinski 2008 | Personal, Galleria Il Triangolo, Cremona 2007 | Alla scoperta, Galleria ArteSi, Ferrara 2007 | Laberintos de soledad, Galleria Ghiggini, Varese 2007 | Genova, Galleria R. Rotta Farinelli Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Genova

Awards

Collective exhibitions

2013 | Olimpia Art Fair,London 2011 | 54a Esposizione d’Arte Internazionale Biennale di Venezia, Padiglione Italia, by Vittorio Sgarbi, Padiglione Regionale Liguria 2011 | Gotha, Fiera di Parma 2010 | Carte dipinte, exhibition of two artists, Galleria Bianca Maria Rizzi, Milano, by Emanuele Beluﬃ 2009 | Spinola Contemporanea. L’arte contemporanea incontra la dimora storica, Galleria Nazionale di Palazzo Spinola, Genova 2006 | Galleria Roberto Rotta Farinelli Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Genova 2004 | Salon I di Brera, Milano 2004 | Immagini di Genova, Comune di Genova 2002 | Galleria San Fedele, Milano

Collaborations

Epson, Genoa Calcio, Sampdoria Calcio