Boris Saccone

The artist employs swathes of colour and abstract shapes to support vivid depictions of myth and nature, using aesthetics as a tool to achieve his emotional landscape. Boris Saccone's paintings accumulate unconscious energies in a mysterious way, ebbing and flowing behind the surface of the work. The artist has achieved this by varying the depth of perspective of these works and by employing universal symbols that lend his paintings a dreamlike quality. And like a dream, the compositions are essential, with emphasis on important elements and their placement rather than a naturalistic representation. It is clear that it is emotion that interests the artist, though perhaps not more than memory, or mystery. These features of human life de-emphasise abstractions in the artworks, and lend power to the images we interpret. The magic of storytelling is present in the way Saccone creates his spaces; in the mountains, the fire, the animals, the nighttime, and the forest so prominent in his works.

Drawing on the century old avantgarde group Die Brücke, pools of considered colours form a bold backbone to Boris Saccone's paintings in oil, acrylic and oil stick on canvas. Broad swathes of land and sky are covered in an instant, using a texture technique reminiscent of an ancient print, or a woodcut from the forests of Europe. Indeed, there is a distinct feeling of the Brothers Grimm to these pieces, his works are thoughtful, vivid, and never naturalistic, with the occasional touch of darkness. Saccone is reaching towards a multi disciplinary oeuvre, often hanging his own painting on the wall for band practice, as for Saccone, music is paramount to the making of art. The artist states that "Music has always been of the utmost importance to me. I want my paintings to look and have a similar energy to the music I like to listen to." A tendency to blend media is also seen in Aktaion (2020), where classical mythology is mixed with the graphic elements of a comic book, while in the forest scene of Lauf Hase (2020) the trees seem almost as if to speak, their leaves reminiscent of a frantic hand writing within a thought bubble container.

Text by Jonathan Ferguson