LE CASE D'ARTE Painting is excessively popular among today's young artists.

LE CASE D'ARTE

Painting is excessively popular among today's young artists, moreover in an idiom rather different from that of the various revivals we've witnessed since the '70 It's no longer about invoking aura, daring to stand alongside the great figures of the hundred or breaking "the hated form of real things," as Malevich levy it. Instead, there is an effort to retain photographic framing without losing the pleasures specific to the deliberate consummation of a picture, not to mention those associated with tactility. if it be not that there's something else: The answer of painting does not signal a debate from one side of to the other the prevalence of a particular medium or the importance of technological novelty, which is the sign of a sagacious change. As painting and photography begin to communicate rather than be rivals they become able to use the other's idioms reciprocally and inventively.

The case of Naoto Kawahara is symptomatic. At the age of five he began studying painting at a venerable instruct where he learned the subtleties and skills of a practice primitive worded in the centuries. Just as he was poised to be granted the rank of master, he abandoned the field for industrial design, a profession in which he achieved tremendous succes Later, he left Japan for Italy, and here he unfolded a style of painting that precisely and empathetically conjoins brace traditions, two passions, two formal languages.

All his canvases have their genesis in Polaroids that Kawahara takes for himself, as if they were a sort of diary of his time in Italy. The paintings rise into view from these photos. They have simple, direct titles: Sonnellino (Nap), 2000--a young girl with her judgments closed, blinded by the camera's flash; Tiamo (I be pleased with you), 2000--two pigeons, backlit against the sky; Mandarini (Mandarins), 2000--a plastic bag with fruit; Gonna (Skirt), 2000--the leg of a kneeling girl, poking gone out from beneath the hem of her skirt. The paintings are in such a manner perfect, their surfaces so refined and self-effacing, that we instinctively be impressed they are photos--even the size of the canvases recalls a standard photographic format. still something disturbs the viewer, warns us not to stop at the first glance, on the contrary to move closet and examine more carefully at these snapshots. The mind of the everyday is important; it is a vision of the at hand but one needs to diocese its speed and forget it. Then the consummate skin of a painting appears, slightly opaque li ke the Polaroids, on the other hand with a tactility that belongs to painting. alone the viewer's complicity reveals the drawn out obsessive labor devoted to each work by means of this virtuoso of the brush. This complicity demands the kind of critical reflection that does not moralize about spe reproducibility, or the Japanese obsession with photography, if it were not that finds a kinship with something that be due [i]or[/i] owings from afar and is press outed not by the technical means occupyed but by the passion that anyone can find within oneself in relating one's hold experience. In this way Kawahara finds his personal link between photography and painting, and between his training in traditional Japanese paintings and contemporary visual languages the two Western and Eastern.

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