Lopyu

Man's life is nothing if not an inexorable "going from the wedge to the grave," Man often feels, and in his own way, the need to give a goal, or if you will, as Viktor Frankl would say, a meaning, to this flow of his. It is a trajectory, that of life, that pushes us inexorably forward, toward what we call the future: something we can only imagine, because it is not yet there. And we do so coming from a past, ours as individuals embedded in a more general one that we share with all of humanity, of which we cherish memories and which we can call history: something that was but is no longer. And it is precisely this concept of letting go of the things of the past, because they have now passed and will never return, that makes us move toward the future, curious about what is to come. Lopyu, setting out to create art, sets no limits and no aesthetic intention. Leaving aside the value of art as a mere aesthetic element, deliberately ignoring the academic canons and laws that, over the centuries, have all too much immobilized the creative and artistic process, the artist succeeds in his intention to slowly produce and construct a work rather than simply imitate the world around him and transport it into images. Mimesis in this sense, does not exist as the work is created and changes at the same time as it is created. There is no intention, no final image that resonates in the mind but rather a natural gesture followed by lightning-fast intentions that slowly, bit by bit go into creating the artistic product. There is no judgment, no written, historical rule. There is intuition and self-criticism that Lopyu exercises at the end of the exercise, at the moment when he has to choose whether, what he has produced, could be considered art or not. The fate of the work and the elevation of the object to the golden status of the work of art is thus decided by his free will and never a priori. Lopyu creates the future, shapes and modifies it without expectation or anxiety to his liking. What comes out are works that smell of extreme freedom of expression where experimentation and mixing of influences, styles and mediums is advantaged and pleasantly exploited. In "Shock Corridor," belonging to the series called "Afternoon Opium," we can dimly glimpse the artist's typical experimental streak In this case, traditional drawing and processing through the digital medium come together creating a totally unprecedented result The real then, is deconstructed, reconstructed and infused with new legitimacy through the use of digital technology. What emerges is a work that acquires a new meaning and depth otherwise impossible to achieve by drawing and speed of execution alone. The digital medium then is a tool for examining the real drawing by implementing a slow and careful reexamination of the previously sketched stroke. From the speed of the real to the slowness of the digital, a phrase that sounds almost "out-of-time" with respect to our everyday life but which in Lopyu's work allows for the continuous creation of unprecedented experimentation, with an eye toward the future.

Art Curator Lisa Galletti