Denned

Technique: Stainless steel, oil.
Size: 73 × 66 cm.

A work by Valerio Carrubba (b. 1975) in the technique that defines his practice – oil on stainless steel. Carrubba paints the image and then repeats it exactly over the first layer; the faint mismatch of contours and the absence of visible brushwork produce the smooth, "synthetic" surface that is the point of the doubling. As in his other pieces, the palindromic title ("Denned" reads the same in both directions) shifts attention from the subject toward the pictorial process itself. The corporeal, anatomically hyperreal imagery is characteristic of his work around the turn of the 2000s–2010s.