Disegno

Galerie Deux Poissons is pleased to present “Disegno”, a duo exhibition featuring works on paper by Giuseppe Di Leo and Susan G. Scott. These two distinguished artists and longtime professors are highly accomplished and recognized in the world of academia, as well as in artistic creation. Both have also committed major aspects of their practices to the production of works on paper: “Disegno” showcases the work of two master drawers at the height of their powers, in cooperative juxtaposition.

The word “disegno” in Italian, first of all, means “drawing”, but implies much more that we don’t normally think of as drawing per se. It also means “design”, from the simplest sense to the most complex. The notion of “disegno” in its largest implications refers to a conceptual and aesthetic plan, to intentions and potential, and the philosophy that is transmitted. Scott and Di Leo are both artists who undertake their work with historical and cultural awareness, with a sense of how every act of making they engage in is connected to a spectacular field of past endeavour, which is something they attempt to add to in the most serious, and committed fashion possible.

Giuseppe Di Leo’s drawings take their origins as equally from Old Master classicism and twentieth-century modern and contemporary forms. A seamlessly personal and unique blend of all these influences, Di Leo’s magnificent drawings evoke and extend spiritual traditions from the catholic middle ages all the way to modern surrealism, always with a methodologically rigorous eye and hand of very nearly microscopic precision. Spiritually modest and open in personal tone and imagery, these drawings labour to the utmost extent to be worthy of the traditions that have inspired Di Leo since his earliest efforts.

Susan G. Scott brings a powerfully sensitive painterliness, as well as rigorous formal virtuosity to her drawing (as to her painting) practice, one which is broad and deep in its incorporation of centuries of artistic knowledge. Engaging with the human figure depicted as presence and absence within a natural landscape that is both an intimate reality, as well as a beautifully imagined place, she treats nature and humanity as interfusing, lovely patterns of each other, attaining a seemingly fragile but profoundly achieved result. This infinitely subtle, timelessly fascinating subject is refracted in space and time by the medium of visible light, in an ongoing search for artistic perfection.