Jennifer Bacon and Filippo Fossati are pleased to announce the opening of the gallery's first solo exhibition by Italian conceptual artist, Nicus Lucá.

"Carol Rama, Aldo Mondino and Alighiero Boetti represent an incursion into the ordinary with the desire of reinventing the world over and over again. The three of them introduced themselves into ambiguous terrain where vision and perception split giving birth to a new and specific poetic thought. Lucá, who has once been Mondino's alumni, made his own their linguistic method but sure enough not their style, Italian critic, Alberto Fiz, states. "Under the influence of these three Torinese predecessors, Lucá deconstructs convention and takes his visual language into a diverse sphere with a broad knowledge of what conceptual art means and can do."

Entitled "StraightPinPaintings", the exhibition presents a series of work that recaptures paintings from Caravaggio to Warhol through straight pins. Hundreds of pins pierced behind the canvas extract the quintessential aspect of each painting and produce a three dimensional quality. His radical and almost provocative gesture of pushing the pins forward is, in a way, to push the past behind and fill the gap between the era of the painting referenced and that of the viewer. In his 12-hour video "Punto" the viewer follows the creation of a painting as the pins, one by one, poke through the canvas.

"...the intent of the artist is to give life to the visual universe through something already widely used or, even better, worn-out."

Lucá's work deals with the transformation of the actual objects and ideology of art-making. His intention is not to produce replicas of world-reknown paintings, but to pierce art history and reveal what is unknown or hidden in and beneath the painting. Depending on where the angle from which it is viewed, the iconic image of each painting seemingly emerges and disappears, as if the painting were giving off fumes and bewildering its surroundings. With the manipulated visible and invisible space, the chiaroscuro created by the pins, the viewer is asked to trace one pin to the other from any angle and tie the pins and surrounded space together. Ultimately, the pin is no longer defined by its role and the image of the historical painting loses its importance. This transformative process and existential approach set his art free from a fixed idea of the existing painting; the past becomes irrelevant.

Lucá acts like a prankster, manipulating the past and present, space and time. with only one tool. Through the relief of pins against canvas, his work confronts what appears and disappears on the surface of the painting. Owing to the illusory nature of the painting, his work exists not to view, but to experience.

Nicus Lucá was born 1961 in Torino, Italy, where he lives and works. His work has been exhibited internationally, including Museo Marino Marini, Firenze, Italy; Museo d'Arte Contemporanea Casa del Console, Calice Ligure, Italy; Centre d'Art de Baie-Saint-Paul, Canada; Trevi Flash Art Museum, Trevi (RM); Museo di Sant'Agostino, Genova, Italy; Galerie Tabea Langenkamp, Düsseldorf, Germany; Museo dell'automobile, Torino, Italy; Galerie Hernst Hilger, Vienna, Austria and Galleria Continua, San Giminiano, Italy. His work has been included in Esso Gallery's group exhibitions.

"Straightpinpaintings" is the first solo show at Esso Gallery.

This exhibition is sponsored in part by the Italian Cultural Institute of New York.