Antonio Freiles Italy, b. 1943

Freiles made his first significant experiences at the turn of the seventies recovering the “practice of painting” which in the sixties had met objections in favor of proclaimed conceptuality of the artistic image and of the assertion of a visual meta-language beyond the bi-dimensionality of the field of conventional painting.  

During the mid-eighties Antonio Freiles creates a collection of paintings using oil paint and graphite, those series marked a new artistic epiphany on the canvas where space, the matter and the light interpenetrate, in which the graphite draws structures, shaded geometries, dome-shaped revealing linear profiles of architectures, mirages of distant invisible cities. The basic spatial configuration and pictorial field composed of juxtaposes configurations on Freiles paintings compels the eye of the viewer to a quick and continual perceptive movement.  

 

With the series Chartae, a series of paintings executed on handmade paper made of cellulose pulp blended with industrial dyes, Antonio Freiles reaffirms his continuous and tight dialogue between the physicality of materials and techniques, and the immateriality of the conceptual elaboration of rhythms and forms.  

 

One feature that can be recognized as a term of a formative and poetic reference through the course of Freiles’ career as a painter is the way he sets before us a field of vision examined in its essential formative phases and then led to a transmuting image beyond the limits of any possible “frame”. Freiles’ work can also be viewed as a sum of pulsations of matter retrieved into a primary formative nucleus and forcefully revealed at every point. 

Freiles pictorial concerns are, among many, the inner conformation of filling in the colour within the shape of the canvas or the paper, Freiles’s painting is an expansion of liquid of colours combined by fine and thick brushstrokes, but bearing a safe direction of movement, giving each work the life of a singular artifact, Freiles is a painter of Mediterranean light, he does not fear the glaring splendor of the yellows, the orange tones, the raw and bloody reds of fertile soils, the violet colours of the “oriental” horizons of the sea town where he lives and the deep and shady greens.  

 

Antonio Freiles has exhibited his artworks in major European biennials and his paintings are part important private and public museum collection including The Tate Britain Museum in London; and the National d’Art Moderne Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. He has also actively participated in numerous cultural art programs collaborating with the British Council in London, the Ljubljana Graphic Biennial, the Maeght Foundation in Paris and the World Print Council in San Francisco.