The Unfolding of Itself















Galleria Eugenia Delfini is excited to begin its fourth exhibition season by presenting The Unfolding of Itself, Lorenzo Modica’s first solo show at the gallery. The exhibition will be introduced by a conversation with the artist Luca Bertolo and will be the occasion to present Modica’s latest cycle of oil and acrylic works on canvas alongside with a series of new works on nylon.
Known for process-based paintings that move between abstraction and figuration, Modica combines traditional formal concerns – such as explorations of color, shape, surface and line, play with figure and ground, scale, and bidimensionality — with approaches from other media (drawing, cartoons, collage, advertising) by introducing qualities such as awkwardness, self-deprecation, affect and doubt into her practice. His work can be contextualised in what art critic Raphael Rubinstein called provisional painting in regard to artists such as Richard Tuttle, Mary Heilmann and Raoul De Keyser. That painting features “works that look casual, dashed-off, tentative, unfinished or self-cancelling” by artists who “deliberately turn away from ‘strong’ painting for something that seems to constantly risk failure or inconsequence”.
Modica is therefore interested in exploring the language of painting itself and how images are generated and circulate from one dimension to another. His practice investigates the surface as a space for the spontaneous emergence of form and is characterized by an unplanned process that incorporates different approaches, materials, and techniques, sometimes arriving at a figure or form that can be traced back to reality as an indication of a possibility.