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Island of Shades
John Descarfino -
““As described by Dante, Purgatory is a mountain-island where the deceased hope for redemption from vices of misdirected or deficient love. The themes of transformation and atonement inherent to Dante’s timeless narrative served as a poetic stimulus for this series of labor-intensive drawings."
Chandler Gallery is pleased to present Island of Shades, an exhibition of works on paper by Brooklyn-based artist John, on view from May 2nd through June 14th, 2025. This exhibition presents sixteen watercolor, colored pencil, graphite and collage works by the artist. Twelve of these works are part of Descarfino’s recent Island of Shades series, and inspired by the island of Purgatory in Dante Alighieri’s epic poem The Divine Comedy.
The resulting twelve works, as well as the four, earlier graphite Flesh and Stone works, are a visually and ideologically rich. Descarfino’s commitment to detail and precision when rendering abstract ideas and themes visually compels and engages viewers in considering the ideas Descarfino is drawing from: contrapasso, atonement, redemption and transformation. The sub-series of Island of Shades (Island of Shades and Terrace) feel as if they could be shifting phases of a single idea or place in eternal flux, while simultaneously reading as topographical studies.
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"I selected structural elements within Dante’s poem to guide my approach for making the drawings. My intention was not to illustrate the narrative, so I looked for themes and concepts in the text that might furnish ideas for materials and processes to use as analogs. With the notion of redemption in mind, I chose a set of watercolor drawings I had already begun working on that I felt still needed further resolution. I thought I might ‘redeem’ them by subjecting them uniformly to new sequences of labor-intensive processes. These entailed transferring, staining, optical and complementary color mixing, cutting, puncturing, and concealing. These processes generated abstract renditions of settings featured in the poem, such as geographical terrains and nebulae. I also sought to draw indirect reference to Dante’s use of contrapasso as a structural principle, in the sense that the drawings were formed out of contradictions and counterpoints, embodying the tensions inherent in such a structure.”
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John Descarfino: Island of Shades
Past viewing_room