Claudio Scotoni was born in Zürich, Switzerland, in 1976. He started painting in 2002 and over the years has developed a focus on structure rather than on a particular subject. In this regard, his paintings are the result of a process in which the structure moves to the centre of what is being represented. His preference for large canvases and his way of using brushes talk of what he calls a “very physical” approach to painting.
I try to reflect, in a most genuine way, the impact of art that first made me want to paint. I believe that the urge to rediscover the most direct encounter between artist and canvas arises in times where the exploration of possibilities has already gone very far, and in places where most paths already have somebody’s footsteps on them.
I usually try to strip down what I call the ‘first movement’ to a reflex, something comparable to what makes you tap your fingers to the rhythm of a song without noticing it. It’s a fight for spontaneity that easily gets lost because of the inner distance between the actor–in the original meaning of the term–and the canvas. Thus, spontaneity has to be found again and again. This first movement often comes from previous approaches to style, words, a phrase picked up somewhere, or just an impression that tempts you to translate it into something visible.
If the reflex is what makes an artist take a brush into his hands, the process inevitably becomes a much more complex issue, where influences of all sorts–conscious and subconscious ones–melt and play a role. My paintings do not have an aim or a goal when I start working on them. The starting point is much more important for the process. Consequently, whenever a painting starts to work, it is much more a matter of balance rather than composition.
In the best case, a painting will somehow acquire a life of its own and turn into something new, still carrying everything that’s convened into it, including what’s desirable and inevitable on my most personal side.
In the end, it's always about an actor meeting materials. In other words, an encounter between the person painting and the canvas. I usually try to strip down this initial moment to just that, to its very core, and in case a particular kind of exchange sets in, a dialogue develops, in which not only the actor changes the materials in front of him, but in which the materials change the actor as well. The result of this process is synthesized in the finally visible elements of a painting.
To work on a painting is often a troubling experience with an uncertain outcome. I don’t believe in paintings that are ‘nice’ or are any sort of pleasure to the eye. I believe in the balance that gets lost as you apply the first strokes of paint on a canvas and the following attempts to re-establish it through colour and composition.