Thomas Scalco from Vicenza
How your way of working has changed?
Initially the situation took me a while’ on the break, as for many of the rest.
When the quarantine began, I had recently finished moving most of the materials from my home to the new studio, located in another country e, then, suddenly unreachable. My luck was in having decided to keep some colors and brushes at home, but above all cards, pencils and all graphic material, which allowed me to survive through the practice of drawing.
This compulsion, then combined with the blocking of projects in progress and therefore without immediate purposes, without external distractions, paradoxically it allowed me to draw with an intensity that I had not experienced for a long time, devoid of planning, in silence and concentration almost as if it were a form of "meditation". Curiously, as I write this, the image of Jung retreating in the Bollingen tower came to mind.
We are dealing with a new time and space. What are you discovering or rediscovering about yourself?
More silence in the first place, an intense and lively silence that extended from night to day.
Then a new relationship with spaces, as I travel a lot and are often out of town.
It is interesting how this closure, forcing us to stop, led us to reopen to our place of belonging, the town or the neighborhood, forcing us to refer to what is close to us, those things under the eyes you want in a hurry, you want out of carelessness before we did not notice: the essential comes back to the eye… International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia, at the same time, we have to put up with the screams of the neighbors' children, pauses in the silence I was talking about a little while ago.
I am reading a lot.
What you're missing? Your personal experience of "absence" and "lack".
Although drawing and reading allowed me to escape, I miss the large spaces tremendously, the woods, the mountain. The excursions, being able to go out and wander aimlessly.
Lack, and I think this applies to anyone, it certainly led me to reevaluate everything, attributing different values to situations that I would have previously placed on the same level. The advantage of these occasions of "detachment from the world" is that desires and objectives are reformulated gradually, the superfluous in our lives tends to re-emerge as such and to be put aside.
How do you imagine the world when it starts again?
This crisis is described as the opportunity we needed to change everything, question our society, our relationship with the world and it could really be the cold shower that will make us reopen our eyes. I really wish it were so but, if I'm honest, I don't have high expectations, I find that the change of opinions and the various second thoughts that have been talked about for two months are closely linked to the here and now and that, if we were given the opportunity, we would go back to doing what we did before.
Surely as soon as we can start moving again, the distance, we will have to live with for a long time, it will be one of the most obvious implications.
Thomas Scalco was born in Vicenza, where he lives and works, in 1987. After obtaining a second level diploma in painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice in 2014, was among the finalists at the Lissone Award of the same year, winner of the first prize Under30 ad Arteam Cup in 2015, invited to the 57th Bugatti-Segantini Award, finalist to San Fedele Visual Arts Award in 2017. He was later selected for the Level award 0 by the G.A.M. of Verona ad Art Verona 2018 and winner of the Under35 Best Artist Award a Setup Art Fair in 2019.
Among the recent exhibitions, temporarily suspended due to the pandemic, the installation intervention Fragments at the G.A.M. of Verona and the staff Silerian at Villa Contemporanea in Monza.
Its reference galleries are: Contemporary Villa, Monza; Luisa Catucci Gallery, Berlin; Superstudiolo, Bergamo. www.scalcothomas.com