ARTIST Isabel Carafì

Personal and Collective Exhibitions:

Argentina (Buenos Aires, Cordoba, La Plata, Patagonia, Puerto Madrin), Canada (montreal), China (Hong Kong, Shanghai), Croatia (Rovinj),Slovenia, France (Paris), Germany (Berlin), Italy (Ascoli Piceno, Bologna, Carrara, Catania, Finale Ligure, Florence, Forte dei Marmi, Genoa, La Spezia, Naples, Milan, Modena, Padua, Reggio Emilia, Rome, Sardinia, Sicily, Treviso, Trieste, Venice), Russia (Moscow), Spain (Barcelona), Switzerland, Usa (New York, Miami), Uruguay (Montevideo, Punta del Este).

Here is brief excerpt of what Maria Campitelli writes about Isabel Carafì:

“For some years now architecture has been the dominant theme in Isabel Carafi’s artistic imagery. In the development of this discourse, broader themes concerning humanity, the socio-political evolution of society, migration, the environment and the ecosystem are inserted from time to time. In other words  architecture becomes a background, a symbol, a container of other situations on which the artist reflects configuring them according to a pattern that, despite the continuous variations, proposes constants. The main constant is the presence of her unique human figures. They are mostly contracted in small, twisted, deformed shapes, which cling on to every space, mobile organic counterpoint to the algid geometry of the hyperbolic profiles of skyscrapers. Isabel Carafi captures above all the inhuman vertigo of the vertical giants accumulated in the metropolis’s skyline, from New York to Shanghai.

Symbols of power, also deformed in the artist’s perspective, they bend to different conjugations  and  imaginative colours, to accelerated lines of flight, breaking into a surreal dimension. Some particular ideas, like glimpses of escalators, are repeated, illustrating an existential frenzy that is grafted into things, into structures. And the distorted humanity, fluttering around and inside the giants increases this sense of swirling life. The surreality is identified in further steps and contaminations, for example in the white backgrounds animated by constipated figurines drawn against the coloured architecture photographed, which is also in turn altered. Then there is the introduction of the element “Nature” between the reinforced concrete and the metal pylons of the American skyscrapers, curiously configured in powerful and tangled tree trunks  forming the backdrop to architectural skeletons. And just as curiously the skyscrapers are emptied, they lose body and substance, they become envelopes crushed by the power of nature. An inversion of roles. Nature that imposes itself on human capacity. And not only  trunks, there are also blurred traces of landscape, of desert, in short the artist’s thought is complicated and changed. No longer just the amazement at  human design an construction capacity, which seemed to prevail in the previous work of the artist. A more complex thought emerges giving rise to more sophisticated contaminations, to more in-depth concise allusions.”.