Innocenzo Odescalchi, was born on May 17, 1956 in Rome, where he lives and works. Hovering over Odescalchi’s big paintings one perceives a new pictorial approach in the poetics of abstraction. His is an astronautical reconnaisance of cosmic darkness, a challenge to nothingness which spitefully conceals yet more nothingness within the uninhabited distances of the invisible.
These paintings appear as maps of concertina universography, which open and fold according to the perspectives of the theories that set the heavens to music.
Odescalchi’s works creatively rely on inventive inputs taken from the prophets of
doom – the gurus of cosmic statistics.
The blazes of the numeric time gauges flare and open fire on history’s nothingness with ‘centuries’ and ‘millennia’ as bullets. Behind the shields of coats of arms lie mummies of chimeras rusted by deadlines. Contraptions in the toys that have tyrannized over many a childhood, and still hold them captive, squeak: a post-war battlefield strewn with bestiaries of flying and crawling creatures; symbolic armaments now turned tame. Silhouettes of animals that once were chimeras file past, moving from one painting to the next forming a hinge joining two paintings together.
Valentino Zeichen