Alfonso Coppola

Alfonso Coppola was born in Carinaro (CE) in 1948. He is in the permanent collection of the MAGMA Museum. He participated in the biennial in the Royal Palace of Caserta in 2004. In the ’60s he attended the Artistic High School of Naples with renowned masters. He has been present on the national artistic scene for more than thirty years with important personal and collective exhibitions, privileging painting and sculpture and lately the
ceramics.
Having the good fortune to enter his studio, one gets the impression of being in an old artisan workshop, where the eye can not stop to focus a single object because it is taken from the variety of works on display. Among gypsum, bronzes, oils on canvas, restoration works and bas-reliefs with valuable finishes, it can be admired in its varied technical capacity. And it is precisely this prerogative that characterizes him as an artist who has never sought shelter in the protective world of the informal, but has landed there through his personal inner and technical research.

“The central event of production is preceded by an almost shamanic rite: the modeled in clay, conceived in its entirety, is sectioned into an indefinite number of fragments that, once cooked, are meticulously recomposed on the surface of the work, redefining symmetries, oppositions and fields of strength. It is the dance of Shiva, the God creator and destroyer together, who presides over  the inexorable cycles of regeneration of the Universe “.

Bibliography:
ARTE VINCIGUERRA – Caserta e Dintorni – oltre cento artisti della nostra Provincia
MONDADORI – Catalogo dell’Arte Moderna Italiana n 39
COMUNE DI CAPUA- Documenta Artis – Le strade dell’arte in provincia di Caserta
MAUI – Museo delle Arti dell’Unità d’Italia di Teano – Le Arti del Bel Paese
AREA 51 – Catalogo Biennale delle Arti dell’Unità d’Italia ( Reggia di Caserta 2004)
AREA 51 – Catalogo Biennale delle Arti dell’Unità d’Italia (Real sito Belvedere di San
Leucio 2008)
ARTEUROPA – Artisti delle Mitteleuropa dell’area del Mediterraneo
ARTEUROPA – Arts, Arti Visive per l’Europa
RUBETTINO EDITORE – Percorsi d’arte in Italia 2016

Below critical note by Rossella Savarese

Numerous personal and collective exhibitions are active both nationally and internationally.

Study, passion and experimentation allow him to easily move from sculpture to painting through the art of ceramics. Strength, impetus and stylistic rigor are its distinctive features. An artist who, thanks to a mastery of techniques, delivers informal cutting works to the public rather than installations and figurative sculptures. In his energetic study the olfactory reference: from the oil used on canvas, to acrylic, to chalks, to resins. Busts, panels, ceramics, preparatory studies and prototypes the latter intended for installations that see him protagonist in several public places.

Today I choose to focus on his work of informal extraction. Flashes of color and light emerge from the background to seal a pre-established input, pertinent to the very conception of the work, an energy present in the remote idea of ​​the author. From a dance around the idea itself, Coppola extrapolates its essentiality, transforming it into action / painting. It strikes the surface primarily from a purely tactile point of view, most of the time made using an amalgam of silicon and pigmented resins. Sensory vibrations and reflections around a previous emotion find time and space for affirmation in the confident and decisive pictorial gesture of the artist.

The work chosen is entitled “I will remember your lips”, made in 2016 and which summarizes what has been said. We are faced with intense, evocative work. From a central draft we move towards the ends of the work itself, in a play of movement from the center to the outside, beyond the physical boundary / limit of the work. The lines generated by a spatula application accentuate and define the singular chromatic passages.

The technique: amalgam of silicon and pigments, size 90 x 90 cm.

Sold in Private Collection