The University of Maine at Presque Isle’s Reed Fine Art Gallery will present Bardo: An Exhibition of Recent Paintings by Adriano Farinella from Aug. 27 through Oct. 6, 2012. The exhibition debuts Farinella’s recent body of work to the Maine art community. The public is invited to view the exhibition throughout the show’s run and join the artist for a closing reception on Oct. 5 from 5-7 p.m. The reception is being held in conjunction with the Presque Isle First Friday Art Walk.
Adriano Farinella is a painter, originally from New Jersey. He received his BFA in Drawing and Painting from Kutztown University of Pennsylvania in 1998. He additionally studied plein air painting in Italy and Santa Fe, New Mexico. Farinella is an instructor of Drawing and Painting at the Baum School of Art in Allentown, Penn. He is widely collected in the Mid-Atlantic States region. His work resides in numerous public and private collections and was recently featured at the Allentown Art Museum’s International Juried Exhibition, curated by Chakaia Booker. Farinella’s work was first introduced to Aroostook County at the recent 10×10: an auction of art event in May 2012. After heated bidding, Farinella’s work was the highest grossing painting of the benefit.
His exhibition, Bardo, is about his use of the skyscape as metaphor for consciousness. His website states, “The clouds represent the infinite ideas, inspirations, emotions, and choices available at any moment. They are full of purpose and presence but are in constant motion, perpetually changing and evolving into some other form, and yet, ultimately remaining themselves. They are at once the beginning of things and the end of things.”
“Bardo” is the Tibetan word for “intermediate state” and can be translated as a transitional state. “What is transcendent in Farinella’s work is the context of his imagery,” Reed Gallery Director Heather Sincavage said. “At first glance, his work appears to be the simple landscape. This is an environment every viewer can relate to. One is drawn in by its beautiful, luminescent use of light and then further enveloped by the introduction of metaphysical and spiritual being. He transforms the viewer’s experience of looking to feeling.”
Farinella further states: “The filter of memory helps transcend the obstacles of time and space. By cultivating the art of memory, the feeling of a time and place becomes more prominent than the actual place itself and the temporal gives way to the eternal. So the paintings become less landscape and more atmospheres. The clouds become figures who have been painted at a time in their lives and who, like human figures, are born, live for a time, change frequently, and then leave.”
His oil paintings will be exhibited Aug. 27 through Oct. 6 in the Reed Gallery. There will be a closing reception for him during the Oct. 5 First Friday Art Walk, from 5-7 p.m. The artist will present a gallery talk at 5:30 p.m. The reception is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served.
The Reed Fine Art Gallery is open Monday through Saturday, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. The gallery is closed Sundays and University holidays. For more information about this event, please contact Sincavage at 768-9442 or heather.sincavage@maine.edu.