Forty COOL Years

2011-06-11

Forty COOL Years

Russell Scarpulla is an artist of profound relevance to anyone of engages in the contemporary discourse around painting.

Forty COOL Years presents works from the late 1970's to 2011, through an exhibit that encompasses three locations: the Artegiro gallery, the gallery space of Il Caffe', and the Enoteca Volodivino, all situated in the historic centre of the town of Montefiascone.

As Peter Frank wrote, thanks to Scarpulla's work in Europe and to the recognition received there, we can now talk of an international style or range of styles,referring at the time to what Frank considered an elementalism in Scarpulla's work. During Scarpulla's minimalist New York period Frank said that' his work harks back to a previous generation of American "hard edge" painting, a generation whose emphasis has been on color and contour and only secondarily on brushstroke and figure-ground relationships'. Scarpulla has been responsible with a bunch of American artists for initiating a transnational style of painting.

Of course Forty COOL Years, as Milazzo says about Scarpulla's work , is bigger than life, as even in the smaller paintings, you feel like before a movie, with echoes of epic sprawls of America with its cliffs, deserts, its excitement.