Gallery: Stefano Losi – The Great Nude

Artist Statement:

The study of classical art and literature has always been an integral part of my life. The Mediterranean culture still emerges as a reference in my visual works, yet with a clear contemporary sensitivity. Journalist and writer Marco Mathieu captured its essence as “Timeless. On the contrary, inside time. And beyond… Significant. Blunt. Stirring, most of all… Strokes and shadows. Black. Intensity, liberty. And love.”

The poetry, regenerating the classical lyric and then neo-teric Greek and Latin schools, intends to provide a personal perspective on the existential unquietness inherent in the human condition, the “arid rain”:

I am generated by restlessness / The uninterrupted movement of the seas of Methymna
Tormented / By a continuous thirst / Powered by a rain of ash and copper

The insistent caress / Of a most terse sand / Projects / In opaque light / My features of burned soil
The thin hands smoothed by the sun
Amongst the wind / Virginal trembling / I approach my lips to yours / Livid / Wet of salt

Slowly / You bring to you my body / Now stripped of shadow
Finally free
As a god / After death I sit behind your eyes of ash

Biography:

Stefano Losi was born in 1969 in Lake Como, near Milan, where he was raised and classically educated in fine arts. After having received his master degree at the Luigi Bocconi University of Milan in 1993, he has been senior manager in different International Institutions, and he is currently official of the United Nations in New York, where he is also President of the UNSRC Literary Cultural Circle. In 2005 he was nominated Knight of the Italian Republic by President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi.

“Violent Dances Fade” (Libertarian Poetical Fragments) is a personal art and poetry project created in Milan in 1991, and further developed in London and New York, that combines on linen studies of the human figure in acrylics and oxidized metal minerals, and an epigrammatic poetry in Latin and English. Following a long series of events organized since the early 1990s in Europe, including several shows and poetry readings in formal and alternative spaces, ranging from galleries, to workers unions and social centers, his art has been honored with different solo exhibitions at the United Nations and in established galleries in New York. Antonio Maria Costa, UN Under-Secretary-General, wrote: “This is a splendid union. In the words of these poems I find the same hope I cherish when I observe the World.”

Four books collecting his visual art and epigrams, providing an overview of the author’s artistic work in the respective creative periods, were published in 1996, 2001, 2010 and 2013. Stefano Losi’s work has been featured in different international publications, among which a book on Italian contemporary artists curated by Renato Miracco, and published under the auspices of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The author continues to create visual art and poetry in Chelsea, New York.