Stefano Moras/Smetterlingssäule

Stefano Moras has worked in Residence in Borca for a month, between October and November 2014.
The series of elaboratons and works developed by the artist in that period of time take the name Schmetterlingsäule, a German neologism, which literally means “the column of the butterfly”.
The artworks are all different from one another, but the approach is the same. This coherence of method is traceable in each of the interventions, which are elaborated, sophisticated, and simple at the same time, in their founding concept.
Moras’ work is, substantially, pictorial. The sensitvity of the painter for the composition, the chromatisms, is highlighted as much in the graphic works, as in the pictorial-installative and the installative-performative ones.
The composition is always carried out through a first de-structuring phase, and a following one of recomposition of all the elements, first fragmented and isolated, and then lead back to unity, through different procedures: stitching, assembling, superimposition, translucence, recombination, fusion.
Doors are opened: inside them, worlds of shape and colour are found, on which to intervene, at times, through the gaps. The doors are installed in a large hall, each of them is a painting, installed to re-modulate the space.
Paper curtains are placed against the windows of the infirmary’s rooms: the chromatic vortex of the resewn shreds gets painted in the light. A dialectic of contrasts is generated among these light, shimmering drapes and the austere chromatically formal modules of the elements of Gellner-style design already there on the walls.
In the small geometric works (clusters of triangles) installed on the Colonia (Eng.: summer camp building)’s ceiling, “working directly with the peeling off layer of colour, geometric shapes (regular or irregular) develop on the surface. At times, tone on tone, at times not: this is a work that is born from humidity and its infiltrating-insinuating in the colous. On-going process.”
“Accumulation often rests on abandon. Starting from this concept or hypothesis I’ve tried to rouse that dormant vitality with an overall vision instead of isolating it in every single object. Smetterlingsäule is a project developed during the month of residence in Borca di Cadore in the former Eni Village: in this work in progress three words have revealed themselves to be fundamental guides, that is to say continuity, contiguity and proximity. The development of the shapes starts from the observation of the environment that at a first glance has ‘literally’ swallowed me up. Not being able to be the author of the artworks myself, being that the space itself it, my role became the one of a frenzied medium, fluid that transports a content, an obsessive conductor. Stefano Moras, Borca, November 2014.”

Stefano Moras

Smetterlingssäule parte 1
Recoposition through sewing and pictorial fragments, oil on paper, about 140×170 cm, 2014
Colonia, Infirmary

Smetterlingssäule parte 2
Site-specific installation: de-structuration of lainated doors, glass fragments, wooden skirting boards and tables, refractory sand and water paint; variable sizes, 2014
Colonia