Ettore Tripodi
Mainly in drawing, a skill he has always practised, Ettore Tripodi combines classical references to art history with scenography associated with filmmaking. He decodes and redefines everyday life, extracting a disquieting strangeness that he never ceases to question…
In very fine lines drawn in felt tips or Indian ink, occasionally accompanied by watercolour, Tripodi sketches somewhat dreamlike, yet easily recognisable, scenes from everyday life. He depicts home interiors with well-stocked fruit bowls or featuring people lazing on the bed… He imagines roads, journeys or nocturnal snapshots, observed by various animals…naturally with references to art history and tributes to Rembrandt, Eugène Delacroix or even Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso and Giorgio de Chirico. He indulges in dynamic scenography that attests to his feelings. When I start drawing,”
he says, “I have a conceptual idea that grows by itself with each new sheet. It doesn’t reveal itself in one specific image, but develops into a sort of cumulation of sensations.” While the spectator can follow a narrative, almost like a comic strip or a storyboard for a film, the artist works on this freedom that he leaves to the paper and “what the drawing itself brings”. Furthermore, this dichotomy is one of the key points of is reflection, attempting to account for the differences in perceptions between man and animal, interior and exterior views, artifical and nocturnal light…
All Tripodi’s archetypes rework the history of myths and relate, for example, a contemporised version of the she-wolf that suckled Romulus and Remus. His thoughts on the themes of savagery, captivity, possession and adoration are woven into these drawings.
He thus hovers between his personal interpretation of The Garden of Earthly Delights and a strange or stifling daily life. He claims to be fascinated by Life: A User’s Manuel, the novel by Georges Pérec, who, in each chapter, “tackles different themes with this form of encyclopaedic folly and a droll detachment that never turns into tragedy”. Through his use of forward and backward tracking shots, he weaves stories that could be read (with their strong stylistic references to the 1930s) as a desire to distance himself from current global issues, but defends himself against all social and political statements. By means of a precise, identifiable vocabulary, he seeks instead to create a new linguistic methodology… through the infinite lines of his drawings.
(texte de Marie Maertens).
