Painting

“Away to Stay” is not merely an exhibition — it is a fragile, fleeting passage, an invitation to linger in a space between past and future, in the last hours of a place once inhabited, while marking the end of the stay with the very first exhibition of the artist’s paintings.

The artist, who has called this space home for almost four years, has chosen this final day to share a deeply personal body of work, a series of watercolors that capture the physical surroundings while transferring on paper sheets (all of the same size but a couple of exceptions) his emotional, psychological, and aesthetic journey through the domestic space, the city outside and the places he has visited with his partner during their stay in India.

“Away to Stay” is a moment of closure, a reflection on identity, memory, and the poetical inhabiting of space as it transforms from a lived environment to an empty stage awaiting its next story. It is this particular dimension that characterizes the display of the watercolors linking the very act of wanting to frame through painting the ever-changing flow of the existence to the domestic space. Attempting to edit the world outside through plein air traditional painting generates a succession of images spanning from plastic buckets on the streets to vast green fields on the Himalayas, from Delhi street vendors to the domestic portrait of a piece of furniture. Images in a succession that parallels the sophisticated apertures conceived by Karel Filsak for the house, these also being intentional frames made to contemplate the outer space.

The viewers enter the emptied apartment to be faced with a continuous controcanto (counter melody), the rhythmic resonance between Karel Filsak’s wise way of tailor-making the architecture to the unspoken wishes of its inhabitants and Kurt van der Basch’s solitary singing in the act of storyboarding the passing of days and spaces.

— Andrea Anastasio