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- 10 - 19
What if the end isn’t a final moment, but a feeling that haunts every corner of life—a flicker in the periphery, a heaviness in the chest, the echo of meaning slipping just beyond reach? In Approaching the End of Eternity, Mario Saponaro crafts a deeply personal and allegorical journey through paintings that unravel the fragile balance between longing and loss, identity and performance, silence and scream.
This body of work is not meant to soothe. It confronts. With unsettling wit, narrative weight, and a strikingly surreal visual language, Saponaro gives form to the thoughts we’re often too afraid to speak. His protagonists—part creature, part human, part caricature of pain—inhabit claustrophobic interiors and barren emotional landscapes. In Eviction Notice, a fish-headed figure drinks numbly as he dangles a hook into a warped mirror, fishing for a version of himself lost to despair. Trash is Trash is Trash offers a bitter eulogy for discarded beings, melancholic bunnies tossed into the wastebasket of their own perceived worth.
Each work carries a whispered question: Who are we when the world stops looking? When all that’s left is the loop of our own fears?
Those Without is a portrait of absence—of the senses, of empathy, of change—where the inability to perceive becomes a prison. Its companion, Those With, flips the lens, exposing the corruptive fear of losing what one clings to. In Nowhere But Back Again, the chameleon—a recurring avatar for Saponaro—slips into the garments of those before him, performing identity in a loop of inherited roles. Even Expiration Dates (Don’t Matter) speaks to decay that is not sudden, but gradual, slow-rotting, familiar.
Yet despite the darkness, Saponaro’s work is never nihilistic. These paintings are survival songs, visual confessions, and broken mirrors turned outward. His figures may be voiceless, but they are not silent. They speak through gesture, posture, metaphor—and invite us to do the same.
As the artist himself writes, painting becomes the act of becoming: “the man that looks back on the canvas—who is afraid to fail but also afraid to stop.” Approaching the End of Eternity does not ask for pity or even resolution. It demands presence. It dares us to sit in the in-between, where endings and beginnings bleed into each other.
The exhibition opens July 7, and runs through September 7, 2025, available online at https://www.exhibizone.com/approaching-the-end-of-eternity-exhibition
Artist:
Mario Saponaro (b. 2001) is a painter with stories to tell. He utilizes illustrative and painterly techniques to guide his viewers on a journey to discover what’s going on beneath the surface. Themes of time, failure, and personal struggle are prominent in his works, in hopes that conversations can be had about the things he can’t just say. He graduated from Stetson University in 2023 with a BFA in Studio Art, along with a minor in Music Performance as a pianist. Currently studying at NYU to achieve a Masters in Fine Art, he plans to continue searching for his place in the art world and to help guide others on theirs.
I speak through art in ways that are not possible for me through speech, spinning the tale of a man walking through life while simultaneously trying to escape it. Painting is an act that allows me to be untethered to the confines of expectation and responsibility or the ever-growing reality of failure and death. Being able to do this allows me to find myself - the man that looks back on the canvas- who is afraid to fail but also afraid to stop. Who brings allegories to life but doesn’t have the gumption to speak them aloud. Who looks in the mirror and finds the very things he paints to escape from? Who am I, are we? -- and where is the exit? Between the lines, the answers are found, as every great story has a memorable villain. In this story, that is my destiny, and what I do to avoid it.
https://www.exhibizone.com/approaching-the-end-of-eternity-exhibition
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