Livio Stabile

I work with rapid strokes like a calligrapher because speed is important as a way of ensuring the integrity of the moment. Painting is a shorthand that uses symbols, signs, gestures to articulate a primal and urgent response to being in the world: basic structures that harbor deep emotion. I want to elicit the surprise of those unexpected meanings we continually rediscover living our lives.

My paintings come out of the darkness because they originate from a nocturnal idea. Color strikes me as the excess of expression. When I use color, it is with the feeling that it is di troppo: saturated, beyond the necessary, a glorious overkill. I explore how the juxtaposition of colors, orientations, and symbolic forms become unified in an unbalanced symmetry of composition. The dazed consequentiality of the figures leaps out to create improbable scenarios while preserving an internal cohesion, the way an oxymoron combines contradictory terms. 

Forms have a meditational nature. Visions are structures that harbor the sign as an epiphany, an unexpected revelation. Although painting is a thought-provoking practice, it is not to be understood as a dissemination of knowledge. Paintings don’t want to be understood; they want to be.

My work is very much grounded in a spiritual universe. I follow a specific direction, going from the concreteness of reality to the enchanting presence of a specific Form. I like to think that my pieces are able to evoke a bottomless, arcane, ultimate Truth.  

Livio Stabile was born in Teano, Italy, in 1980. He is an artist and architect (LivioStabile.com) who lives and works in Los Angeles.