scotty potenza

Lukalkari, Chile

Despite the constant reminder embedded in his first name, Scotty Potenza is one of those artists it’s almost impossible to think of as Scottish. In fact, like Alicia Keys, Richard Demarco and Alberto Morrocco, Potenza is a Scot of Italian origin. His parents – economic migrants fleeing Sicily – arrived in Glasgow in the early 1970s, and by the time Scotty was born in 1973 his father was a successful entrepreneur operating an inexplicably popular chain of ice cream parlours across Scotland’s freezing, drizzly central lowlands.

The colour, shape and texture of fresh ice cream is certainly visible in Potenza’s acrylic gouaches; peach, pistachio and purply-red forest berries distinguish themselves forcefully from the sodden greens and asphalt greys of the Scottish industrial landscape. His subject-matter shares this otherness: influenced by the exciting first wave of Acid House culture in the late 1980s, Potenza evinces a non-Calvinist positivity more evocative of Chicago warehouses and