UNTITLED

I wasn’t alive when the Neorealist movement shattered the staid cinematic conventions of post-WWII Italy. But ever since I fell in love with that style of filmmaking I’ve become aware that realism, as an aesthetic, always surfaces in times of difficulty and change.

Yet war and panic also inspire escapist fantasies, abstraction and private, invented worlds. So I was pleased to see both tendencies in the fascinating paintings of Pierpaolo Campanini at Blum & Poe (blumandpoe.com, through April 5).

A native of Ferrara, Italy, Campanini, 44, starts by building intricate sculptures often inspired by Kurt Schwitters’ Merz sculptures: Twisted branches dangle in midair, wrapped in leather and augmented by strange wooden constructions.

Then Campanini spends months translating the objects into paintings. As a result, the gap between the raggedness of his subjects and the sheer virtuosity of his hyper-realistic painting technique creates a tension he likes to emphasize.

To render a subject on canvas, says Campanini, an artist has to piece it together to where “it’s nothing more than the sum of its parts.” But when the sum of those parts is random or unnatural, he adds, “it becomes white noise, or abstraction.” So his paintings exist squarely between the real and the imagined.

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-- theguide@latimes.com