Emanuele Dottori, IL BUCO CON LA CITTÀ INTORNO

Room 15

I like to look carefully, to observe, to analyse, to anatomise everything that surrounds me. Especially architecture, the city, to walk through, to cross. This is where my subjects come from: they are all places I have observed, crossed in my daily life. Skylight is the hole in Milan’s Central Station, the skylight that plunges from the centre of the square into the metro. Everyone passes by, many see it, but no one knows it is there. I started looking at it because I realised it was there, and I started painting it because I realised how much it contained, in those few metres of emptiness: from the hole, from the metro, you can see the hole itself (its “thickness”) with its red rings, and beyond it you can see the sky with its colours, its greys, its clouds. The square, the Central Station, the Pirelli skyscraper can be glimpsed, peeping out from behind its curves, as if to jump into the hole. And I’m inside: in the glass halfway down the hole the whole city is reflected with its symbols. On the lower level there is the metro, its lights, entrances, subways, shops, turnstiles, stairs, spaces, exits; on the upper level, looking around you can see other spaces, other exits, around the hole; it is a sort of windowsill halfway between the square and the metro from which you can see outside and inside the hole: its open-air underground square, below, traversed by commuters, wet from the rain, drawn by a circle of white snow, when there is one. And once outside, from above, from the square, looking inside, you see its red circles, you sense its perfect geometry, the repetition of the circles, you see more clearly its emptiness, its opening in the middle of the city. A ring surrounds it, preventing us from ending up below. These 210 watercolours are a synthesis of all the things I have seen, observed, crossed, discovered, standing in front of it. Or rather, inside, outside, around… In front.
Emanuele Dottori

Emanuele Dottori creates interior architectural landscapes, where the idea of the place-avatar returns, embodying different ways of being. The pictorial re-elaboration of the skylight in the square in front of Milan’s Central Station is exemplary in this regard: Dottori started from some photos taken with Google Earth and already at this stage managed to humanise the space and make the skylight ambiguously anthropomorphic or at least organic, and in this context it takes on the appearance of a gigantic gaping mouth reminiscent of Star Wars imagery. Finally, the artist moves from re-elaboration to abstraction, seemingly moving away from the virtual physicality of the internet image to an inner, personal vision that nevertheless retains a sense of the humanisation of the place.
Mario Gerosa

Emanuele Dottori was born in Cernusco sul Naviglio in 1983. He currently lives and works in Rome. In 2006 he graduated from the Brera Academy of Fine Arts. In 2006 he exhibited Villa Fiorita at the Gheroartè space in Corsico. In 2007 he held an exhibition at the Spazo Oberdan in Castelseprio and in 2009 the personal exhibition Skylight_Disegni at the Sala rossa of the Galleria Ghiggini in Varese. April 2010 saw the conclusion of Skylight_Disegni e Collages at Studio Maffei in Milan.