David Carpanini – The Glass of Dreams

Private View: Sunday 8th September 2024

The Exhibition continues until: Saturday 28th September 2024

To view the exhibition click here

I came late to viewing a full exhibition of David Carpanini’s work. I’d seen individual paintings, of course, and examples of his marvellous etchings and prints, but it wasn’t until I received, from the prestigious Attic Gallery in Swansea, an invitation to open David’s 2014 exhibition  that I experienced the full impact of his unique take on a world that I believed I knew well.

He was raised in Abergwynfi, at the head of the Afan Valley which snakes east from Port Talbot, deep into the central massif of the South Wales coalfield. Visually and historically, it is a place of great drama: steep hillsides, torn with quarries and with the remnants of the pits and railways that mined and hauled millions of tons of coal to the coast. Houses, built to accommodate the miners and their families, cling in long terraces to slopes more suited to ski-runs than streets. Roads twist and turn out of the Afan, high over the mountain to Rhondda, Nantymoel and Maesteg. The people who lived and worked in that valley had to be tough and resolute to survive. Coalmines were dangerous places; all too often, lives were lost, lungs and limbs damaged. Yet, those same people made, out of these adversities, communities that were vibrant, proud and eager to celebrate their special identities in music, drama, cinema and art.

Those same people are at the heart of David Carpanini’s work. In his pictures, they stand in streets and lanes, and on roads and corners that would be recognised immediately should one visit Abergwynfi, Cymmer or Blaengwynfi. He has an extraordinary ability to observe and capture the essential details of the houses, hillsides, steps, railings, stone walls and garden sheds that give those communities their unique character. The figures he places in those scenarios are real people; they are faces I have encountered in communities right across the coalfield. But there is also magic at work in these pictures.

Look again at the streets. Where are the lines of parked cars present on all of our kerbsides now? Look at the terraces of houses. Why, in David’s pictures, have they all retained the chimneys they were built with when virtually all of them were dismantled in the 1980s? Look at the clothes in which David’s people are dressed. Why are some raincoats, jackets and hats infinitely more the styles worn in the 1950s than the styles worn now? There is no shortage of contemporary clothing in these pictures, but it exists so easily alongside the trilbies, flat-caps, shirts and ties of a much earlier age.   

The magic David Carpanini injects into these images lies in his ability to concoct a rare and potent mix of contemporaneity and history. There are all kinds of ingredients, the most vital of which include a deep knowledge and experience of the subject matter (he even remembers that South Wales lies beneath the main air routes from Europe to America, which is why his skies frequently are streaked with the remains of vapour trails); a profound affection for the landscape and people he grew up with; a sense of design and composition which hauls one into his pictures with such force, and, perhaps most importantly, a command of artistic skills which are, quite simply, awesome.

This is a very special artist, and I congratulate the Fosse Gallery for mounting this celebration of his work.

Rt Hon Dr Kim Howells

Pontypridd

July 2024