LONDON.- rosenfeld porcini presents From Battlefield to Paradise an exhibition by Swiss painter Cesare Lucchini, which follows his inaugural UK show Those Who Remain (2012). The gallery will feature the artist’s most recent oil works on paper and canvas.

Cesare Lucchini’s second exhibition at rosenfeld porcini pursues his exploration of certain dramatic events, which have and continue to afflict contemporary society such as the oil slick disaster in Mexico (2010), the boat tragedies off the Sicilian island of Lampedusa, and African conflicts – more specifically the use of child soldiers.

Amongst the paintings in From Battlefield to Paradise, certain pieces feature bodies trapped within a mesh of barbed wire or people caught in airplane bombings. However, Cesare Lucchini’s depiction of war has nothing of the stark reality of Otto Dix or the satire of George Grosz. Lucchini is in the studio every day and paints: All his doubts and discoveries become visual results on the canvas. His dynamic brushwork, nervous line and extraordinarily rich colours give his paintings a great lyricism; what ultimately interests the artist is the melancholy and desperation in the human condition.

Although, Lucchini has always been a painter of the living, this exhibition places the landscape as an equal protagonist; in the war related paintings it is as an unwilling accomplice, but in many of the other pictures it is seen as an unattainable paradise, which is always strived for but never reached due to the incapacity of man to ever rise above his own limitations.

Cesare Lucchini’s most recent works no longer look at human cruelty but rather at the insolvable contradictions of man’s condition. Lucchini’s figures are deconstructed and a collection of variegated parts: They establish a certain connection with Picasso; however whereas the late master was interested in exploring ways of seeing, Lucchini recounts the drama of man and the impossibility of achieving wholeness. Lucchini is not an existentialist; the artist is not concerned about man alone in a Godless universe, but rather in the difficulty of living with the knowledge that the dream – e.g. the mountain; the clear blue sky – can never be reached. Man has to lose that very essence which constitutes his ability to love but also, alas, to hate in order to achieve his paradise.