Guido Corazziari; The Reinvention of Pop Art through the prism of History

Sparkling like a birthday cake, Guido Corazziari's paintings are instantly appreciated for their chromatic arrangements of sweet subjects combined with serious motifs, creating an instantly recognizable synergy of cool elegance and soft sensuality. The paintings are strongly influenced by the fantastic world of cartoons, pop culture, rock music, and worldwide media, all contributing to a unique aesthetic creation. Its as if fifty years of world history has been squeezed into one frame; as if time and space had collapsed like an over stuffed hard-drive, the electronic bugs now in charge of it's fractured state. With bold colors, cartoon styling, strident collage and ghoulish rendering of the sacred and profane, these paintings are made to grab your attention and create pure joy for the eyes. The paintings are multilayered, both visually and conceptually. You are first overcome by the colors: glossy, shinning, and brilliant. The canvases are often monochromatic but play with complementary colors. Your second reaction is to try and decode the compressed and overlaid shapes of international symbols, famous logos, images of movie stars, pop icons and cartoon characters. These figures are distorted and reinvented in new colors and then combined in unusual and shocking ways, letting the viewer see beyond their original simple reading and creating new conceptual and philosophical conceits which reveal the mind of the author. Working with realistic as well as re-invented images, the paintings play with balance and dynamics, coupling and contrasting opposites such as the real versus the fantastic or our positive and negative associations of an image, which both confirm and contradict their relative natures. In redefining abstract versus iconic, or conceptual versus Pop, one would think these paintings might be very limited due to the simple duality created by juxtaposing their opposites. But this style ultimately creates images that are both easy to read and yet complex in their juxtaposition and seem always ready to vanish or to re-appear, as if by their own will and desire.

Karl Nussbaum ( 2008 - New York )