ELIO WASCHIMPS
INQUIETE PRESENZE. TESCHI, OMBRE
curated by Alessandra Antonia Sito
texts Aldo Gerbino and Marcello Palminteri
11 - 26 FEBRUARY 2025
Paintings, drawings and sketches are on display, tracing the artist's unique research trajectory up to the late expressionist abstractions. As the curator emphasises, ‘Elio Waschimps, who died in 2022, is now spoken of too little. A reserved and introverted artist, Waschimps (...) populates his canvases with solitary and vulnerable creatures, marked by the horrors of war and violence. Through these figures, the artist leads us into the darkest meanderings of the unconscious, inviting us to confront the fears and frailties we often prefer to ignore.’
The catalogue, published by JUS Museum, also contains texts by Marcello Palminteri and Aldo Gerbino, who writes: ‘It is the bristling edges of an existential melancholy that emerge from Elio Waschimps’ paintings, in his extending a blanket in which laminating echoes nest. Now a screech of chalks, now a fugue, now a rope barely raised in the leaden sky. Embryonic life of a collapsing society? Perhaps. Meanwhile the eyes of adults are absent, dispersed in the orbital cavities of a skull: faces desiccated in black pigment erasures.’
