Livio Stabile: EXODUS
Livio Stabile in his studio in Hollywood, Calif., preparing the exhibition.
Forced to leave home on a perilous journey.
In the five unsettling works on display, paint mixed with ocean sand is fiercely applied over canvas and stucco lath, evoking battered walls and devastation.
Studio Exhibition | On view April 5 – April 27, 2024 | Opening reception Friday April 5th, 5:00 pm – 8:00 pm
April 5, 2024, Los Angeles, California—The exhibition Livio Stabile: Exodus graphically explores the abrupt cut of being uprooted. The artist’s engagement with paint, sand, cement, and metal lath are inspired by his experience of the construction site as an architect. The paint-and-sand texture evokes walls that have been battered and violated – walls that deny access and block vision, creating two opposing worlds. Yet at the same time the wall-like surface supplies narration of the otherwise ignored story of human and animal migration fleeing anthropogenic disasters across the globe.
The large triptych, accompanied by two smaller works, invites the viewer to pause and empathize with those experiencing the brutality of a perilous journey toward a promised land in hope of new life. The words Temple, Shelter, Exodus, Esodo (Italian for Exodus), Rifugiati (Italian for refugees) incorporated into the paintings dissolve in gestural strokes of color, acquiring multiple identities and evoking the bittersweet appeal of names hand-painted on the hulls of migrant boats. The canvas juxtaposes with these words the symbolic forms of temples, tents, flags, caravans, wrecked vessels, and floating bodies. Daily news coalesces into a complex fusion of materials, gestures, and symbols.
A native of Italy, Livio Stabile has lived in Los Angeles since 2008. His formation as an architect in Rome carries the influence of Italian post-war polymaterialist experimentation and the 1980s Transavanguardia movement into his contemporary artistic practice. In 2006, he worked in the planning department of architect Paolo Soleri’s urban laboratory Arcosanti (in northern Arizona), exploring the conviction that architecture is a practice incorporating all the fundamental spheres of living. His drawings and gestural paintings seek to bring emotion, figuration, and mysticism back into art. To ensure the integrity of the moment he works with rapid calligraphic strokes in an essentially two-dimensional space. A density of signs reminiscent of medieval art and baroque spatial relations remain strong determinants in his work.
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General Information
Location: Livio Stabile studio is located at 6646 Hollywood Blvd #205, Hollywood, California. The studio is on the second floor of the historic Hollywood Cherokee Building. Public transportation: Metro B line Hollywood / Highland. Parking: street parking.
Opening reception: Friday April 5th, 5:00 pm – 8:00 pm
Exhibition hours: Friday and Saturday, 5:00 pm – 8:00 pm. Free and open to the public.