From funeral services to the famed David Bowie song to a British sci-fi series, the phrase “ashes to ashes” takes on a new strain of meaning with every use. With Fulvio di Piazza’s recent show at Jonathan LeVine Gallery in New York, this metaphoric 360-degree view of life is reimagined once again. Ashes to Ashes depicts smoldering scenes with anthropomorphic detail. Faces appear against mountain ranges as though built from twisted kindling that has been charred to varying degrees. Plumes of smoke billow from all corners of the paintings and embers shoot out from eyes and mouths. In Di Piazza’s images, the world is both built and consumed by ash.
Palermo-based artist Di Piazza was working on his painting “Uomo Nero”—centered around a wonderfully grim face with blazing irises that rise to form thick clouds of smoke that double as eyebrows—when he stumbled across a copy of economist Jeremy Rifkin’s controversial book Entropy in his father-in-law’s library. The author’s grasp of entropy and thermodynamics has often been questioned, but the artist appreciated Rifkin’s
philosophical interpretation of the second law of thermodynamics on a metaphoric level. “We are nothing and earth [does] not belong to us,” he explains through a translated email. “I mean this in the sense that man, with his idea of progress, does not consider that his actions have a devastating burden on the balance of nature,” says Di Piazza.
For Di Piazza, this manifested in the ashen scenes that were forming on his canvases. He was searching for something that he saw missing in daily life, “natural energy” as opposed to the energy that, he says, “man tries to produce daily in the name of progress that, in our case, means destruction.” Soon after, he heard David Bowie’s hit, “Ashes to Ashes,” piping through the radio and all the pieces of inspiration he needed for the show, including the title, were in place.
…the city of Palermo is the perfect mix between sunlight and darkness.”