March 6—May 2, 2026
Opening reception:
Friday, March 6, 2026
6:00 to 8:00 PM
CLAMP is pleased to announce “Fabio Torre: In Focus—Paintings,” the artist’s third solo show at the gallery. “In Focus—Paintings” brings together two recent bodies of work. The first, titled “Lenses,” is a group of oil paintings on paper dating to 2020 which depicts the specialized optical components that focus light onto a camera’s sensor or film to create a sharp, intentional image. These representations of lenses are vaguely monumental portraits, which directly relate to Torre’s earlier paintings of cameras.
The second series, “Perfect Lovers,” consists of double-portraits of men. Two paintings of the same subject are presented side by side on the same sheet in a single frame. At first glance, the two depictions may appear identical. However, they derive from two consecutive frames, taken from the same photographic session, and are characterized by minimal differences in focus, light, or millimetric movements of the eyelids.
Brought together, “Lenses” and “Perfect Lovers” aim to explore the theme of the gaze through the mechanical instruments (the lenses) and the objects of the gaze (the perfect lovers). Yet the gaze is made unstable by the duplicity of the frames, which suggest an elapsed period of time—a “before” and “after” (however short the duration). The juxtaposition of the portraits, with their enigmatically cinematic effect, and the lenses, which bridge the warlike and the phallic, creates a tension both aesthetic and erotic.
This exhibition continues Fabio Torre’s research, begun a quarter of a century ago, on the relationship between painting and photography. The oil on paper paintings, executed in a classic photographic black-and-white, would have been described as “photorealistic” in decades past. But the relationship between Torre’s paintings and the medium of photography is intended not to be solely technical in nature, but also conceptual, with the consideration of photography’s technical aspects (depth of field, light, etc.), along with its classical subjects (still life and portraiture), and the very tools of its creation (namely lenses).
Fabio Torre was born in 1955 in Bologna, Italy, and now lives and works in Bagnarola di Budrio (Bologna). He has been exhibiting and publishing his paintings and photographs in Europe for twenty-five years.