Painting on a small scale
The artist's ability to concentrate poetics in a limited space with an obsessive attention to detail often taking inspiration from digital images
5' min read
5' min read
Over the last few years, we have witnessed the absolute predominance of painting, whether abstract or figurative, as the protagonist in the art market and in the most emblazoned art events such as the Biennials. Not only large paintings, canvases that take over space, but contemporary painting today is also the "atypicality" of the small format that various artists have chosen to express their creativity. Whereas in the past, small paintings were mostly preparatory studies for larger works, today nothing is left to chance and the small work is complete in its entirety and has found the interest of curators and the art market. For example 'Guppy' by Francisco Sierra (Chile, 1977, lives in Switzerland) is an installation of 48 tiny wooden panels (6.5 × 6.5 cm), mounted on concave reliefs, in each of which a life-sized guppy, also known as a rainbow fish, is painted.
The installation, which was purchased by a private collector, surprisingly won the inaugural edition of the Unlimited People's Pick award of the section Art Basel Unlimited, curated by Giovanni Carmine, where works of monumental dimensions are exhibited. The design of the small fish - named after the British naturalist Robert John Lechmere Guppy, - broadly reproduces the aesthetics of domestic aquariums but with a critical attitude towards the breeding of animals for decorative purposes. The project addresses issues of scale and is significant of the artist's irony in proposing his paintings in the smaller format for Unlimited. A self-taught painter, Sierra paints in various formats, from large to very small, and considers miniatures an ode to painting. According to his representative gallery von Bartha (Basel), Sierra's works explore 'the pitfalls of contemporary photographic reproduction and the transformative potential of painting'.
A maniacal attention to detail
.The small format is the result of a continuous evolution of painting and the fruit of a masterly pictorial skill that makes use of techniques characterised by the utmost slowness, as in the use of pastel, to appropriate fragments of reality. The theme of the almost maniacal attention to detail was documented by the curator Chiara Nuzzi in the exhibition "Small Fixations" at the Fondazione ICA back in 2022, an exhibition project that "evoked the multiple meanings that the term 'fixation' takes on in the Italian language, from an obsessive interest in the physical act of imprinting matter, to the careful and almost maniacal observation of the smallest details".
An example of this are the small and meticulous paintings byChiara Enzo (Venice, 1989) indicated by Cecilia Alemani as one of the most interesting artists in the exhibition "The Milk of Dreams" at the 59th Venice Biennale, curated by Alemani herself. The Venetian painter works on a small scale, works that require a very long time for their realisation, the combined effect of tempera, gouache, pastel, coloured pencils, all on a cardboard surface glued on canvas. With painstaking work, the artist reproduces fragments of bodies, details of wounded and stained skin based on live subjects and images collected from magazines, social media and historical medical texts, reproduced with dense, textured marks. For the artist, working on the small format is closely linked to his poetics and he considers his compositions to be plots of a filmic script, in which the body manifests itself in fragments (from Galleria Zero... Milan, for drawings €3,000, while paintings range between €8,500 and €20,000).
In the small-format painting of the twins Carlo and Fabio Ingrassia (Catania, 1985), there is an almost maniacal attention to the smallest details that is absolutely peculiar to the work of art. The works are made by four hands, one being left-handed and the other right-handed, and each project is meticulously executed according to a precise methodological scheme. The two artists work simultaneously on the same square centimetre of a particular paper support, Schoeller paper, organised by means of a grid, whose weight and absorption capacity of the cardboard favours the sedimentation of pigments and powders, creating a perfect harmony between the lines and dots that make up the complex figures. In the work 'Novecentist Abstraction (The Red House)', a 9 × 9 cm painting depicts a window metaphorically framed by the reddish leaves of climbing plants, and is made with coloured pastels (from Galleria Zero.... Milan, prices range between EUR 9,000 and EUR 15,000).
