Painting a fantastic world

… A few years ago I wrote about Spoletini’s photographs, giving the name Photoplay to those insertions, at once both likely and improbable, of old toys within completely real landscapes. In 1998 Photoshop had just come out and was very popular and Spoletini enjoyed simulating it by creating small sets using cardboard, colours, soil and many other things, positioned in such a way that with a wide-angle lens they became visually coherent. An irony which naturally found further reinforcement of sense through the use of toys. With this I would like to underline how Spoletini was well into the dynamics of visual language, of innovations, like limits which inevitably show, above all in his initial works. This is essential in order to better understand his painting too. Our way of seeing and our representational capacity are so radically changed in comparison with the past, that we can encounter more than just a few difficulties in trying to find alignments, even only of sense, with the past, if we don’t keep in mind the milieu in which we are operating. It is therefore clear that if the photos referred to a capacity of composition and elaboration of the image which is completely new, then surely something analogous was happening (and is happening) in painting. Spoletini paints flat surfaces, monochrome but as if they were lit from the back, with a completely unnatural sense of perspective and often split onto more than one level, in the sense that they appear more coherent to what is visible on a screen than to a realistic type of representation. …

Raffaele Gavarro