Basile Di Manski

Basile Di Manski has been painting since his early adolescence, his painting has retained its freshness and a certain innocence. His retro-futuristic urban landscapes, structured like interior architectures, offer an escape (even a refuge) to the viewer: swimming pools, windows, stairs, medians, pipes, skateboard ramps and slide bars; all these playful structures form a playground intended to circulate the gaze and to establish an exchange between the exterior and the interior of the painting, which itself becomes a door through which the spectator can come and go, as he pleases, and so access the imagination (the artist's famous "California Mentale") and surrealism to build their own movements, their own narrative. The first pictures painted by Basile were painted on old doors.

The gaze wanders through these seemingly idyllic towns and we realize that they are strewn with disparate autobiographical elements, accumulated by the artist while he surveyed the futuristic minerality of the skateboard spots of La Défense, or that, overwhelming and archaic, of the cities of Italy at dusk. Beneath the sweetness of the dolce-vita, we sometimes feel a certain anguish dawn, the one we feel when faced with the absurd, with competition queen, or even with the violence of ultra-liberal modernity.

In this sense, Basile Di Manski's painting is as retro-futuristic as his pop music, where temporalities and textures mix without distinction or hierarchy.