Robert Kelly, Paul Fleming, Joe Mancuso, Santiago Cucullu and Emilio Perez, together for the first time in a group show inaugurating AR Contemporary Gallery in Milan.

Organised in collaboration with Barbara Davis Gallery of Houston, CAUTION ON FIRE
shows the other side of American art, because in Italy we rarely see the work of artists who were born in America or adopted it as their homeland other than those who work in New York or California. Artists on fire – according to Roberto Annicchiarico and Barbara Davis, who conceived and promote AR Contemporary Gallery- “are very different from one another in terms of backgrounds and styles, but share something that unites them even more than a style or artistic movement: they have a vision. And it is vision that makes GREAT CONTEMPORARY ART, that defines the essence of art, that makes it something universal and timeless”.

Freedom – an idea that seems to “catch fire” only through art these days – is the other important point shared by the CAUTION ON FIRE artists. Their works reveal that the “American dream” still burns on, stronger than ever, in the torch of artistic freedom: the sole expression of life that has never stopped burning in the heart of the United States of America.

Robert W. Kelly’s paintings “show us that freedom is a way of feeling at home in a world that is not made for us” (Lyle Rexer, The New York Times). Santiago Cucullo’s wall paintings – exhibited at the most recent Biennial of New York’s Whitney Museum – give us a VISION of a world where yankee toughness is diluted in the great democratic tradition of South American wall paintings. Joe Mancuso’s installations are “visual poems” which, as Susan Kandell of the Los Angeles Times has said, “lay waste to the other America”. And freedom of vision is also conveyed by Emilio Perez and Paul Fleming. Perez’s works recall the “spontaneity of jazz improvisation” (Paul Laster, Tema Celeste). Paul Fleming’s sculptures convey “an energy that invades not only the exhibition space, but the observer’s spirit” (Catherine Anspon, Art in America).