Painter Carlo Angelo Saavedra calls his new works “imperfect objects”. The treatment of the paintings is far from standard: frames hacked with a dull axe; paint overflowing the canvas limits; suggested figures emerging from a coat of mud-like mixtures; surfaces abused with the constant process of trial and error.

Saavedra holds that his aim is not to deconstruct or to deface. According to the artist, it is quite the opposite. Working with salvaged wooden frames and old paintings, Saavedra gives these found objects or subject matters new identities as instruments to an evolution of the creative process. “I’m never iconoclastic”, he says. “The job of a painter is to make a memorable painting - not to vandalize.”

And despite a number of people always commenting that his paintings never veer away from the macabre, Saavedra insists that he is, above all, optimistic. Inspired by poetry and what e.e. Cummings describes as “a fascination with the verb and the movement it creates in language”, Saavedra points out his own fascination with the synesthetic quality of poetry and how within this idea, there resonates something autobiographical.