Something, 2024

Andrea Capecci  

Andrea Capecci was born in 1977 in San Benedetto del Tronto and has always been active in the artistic world with various facets, from fashion to performance to painting. Andrea Capecci's canvases stem from the need to transpose the glossy field of fashion into artistic expression. 

There have been many forays into art by renowned designers, who have enriched their brand by drawing on the figuration of famous works of the historical avant-garde. From Mondrian to Fontana, from Burri to Bonalumi, art has been worn as a banner that could justify being contemporary and thus glamorous. 

In the case of Andrea Capecci's works, it is fashion that offers itself to art, since the canvases on which the artist expresses himself undergo, once painted, the chemical washes to which fabrics are normally subjected before being made. 

Fashion enters transversally into artistic creation, not by retraining art as a fungible object, but to become an active subject that can take part in an unconscious figurative process, on par with the authorial one. 

Andrea Capecci's supports are the #denim or the traditional mesticata canvas to which the artist reserves the same treatment: during the washing process, the fabric on which Capecci has previously painted loses its background layer to allow the cotton wefts to emerge, interspersed with an imploded and interrupted abstraction; the shattered forms and faded colors stand out on an eroded canvas that reveals the affixed chromatic layering. 

Capecci's aesthetic operation is reminiscent of the interventions of artists gravitating around Situationism; in fact, his works, exhibited without a frame, recall the "Industrial Painting" of Pinot Gallizio of Piedmont, who in the late 1950s daubed long rolls of fabric and then sold them by the metre during the exhibition. 

It is the incursion of the trivial expedients of commerce into the now desacralized sphere of the art gallery to denounce a creativity subjugated to the culture industry. 

If Gallizio shapes the shift from the fashion griffe to the standard of the industrial process, Capecci's intent is to trigger an automatism and psychic and mechanical to which he entrusts the creation of canvases: from dripping to chemical washing to the exposure of some works to the elements. It is the randomness of the process that brings out a removed that is as much psychological as industrial.