Carlo Bottoli, a student of the artist Franco Gentilini, completed his studies with a degree in painting from the Accademia delle Belle Arti in Rome. His painting focusses initially on the inner life, yet at the same time also considers the outside world.
Awareness of oneself, of one’s emotions, is presented within a context in which faces filled with light and shadows blend together in cosmic suffering. He is in effect an instinctive painter with an acute sense of the harmony of colour and proportions. In order to express himself and the world, however, he requires other factors that make a more visible impression with tangible effects perceptible on both a tactile and visual level. He is therefore driven to project emotions through the movement of colour: this is the moment at which painting meets sculpture. Carlo Bottoli has worked ceaselessly to design a unique artistic technique to suit his expressive aims. A work of art is thus created that goes beyond painting, taking on a perceptual ambiguity that is transmitted via its eternal movements through space. The autonomous languages of painting and sculpture are surpassed: the lightness of paintings is expressed in forms that present the three-dimensional thickness of sculptures.
The wooden table, the work’s point of departure with its harmonious, symmetrical or asymmetrical form, holds the canvas that corresponds to the underlying contours. It is covered with plastic which, thanks to the purity of the lines and structures of which it is composed, allows the search for a “new dimension” to emerge. This three-dimensional effect is created not through the perspective mechanisms of painted colour, but rather via a special system of shaped canvases and protrusions obtained by injecting a substance into the work: expanded polyurethane.
The plastic thus tautens and takes shape generating concavity, convexity and intense, emotional chiaroscuro effects of shadow and shimmering light that echo the external glimmer.
The artist calls them “light sculptures” as they may be hung on the wall in a traditional manner yet move through space with the rhythm and depth native to sculpture.
A work of art is thus created that goes beyond painting, projecting emotions through movement: it is the point at which painting meets sculpture in order to bring colour to life in a three-dimensional manner.