Beginning
At first, the blank canvas and its Everything is possible stands before you, and it seems strange and impregnable. I begin to attack it. The instinct is liberated. I follow a vague tumultuous idea and almost like in a dream the raw material of emotion is poured onto the canvas.
Successively I try to understand, and understanding I help to develop what instinct have dictated. I caress now the canvas previously aggressed by a storm of wild forms and hues and I begin to separate the good from the superfluous. It is the moment to refine and define within the framework of your personality that can be called style, a mirror of all the cognition and impulses in search of a form that guides one’s actions; and how to preserve or destroy becomes a sort of moral problem.
Thus, from the beginning, improvisation and control coexist. A flow of color, subjected to the law of gravity, scattering its streams in the immensity of the canvas at different speeds, meets other flows of color that reject or mix them into whirls and sedimentations. Ponds and creeks are formed, I wonder where they will stop; but I know that I shall eliminate any trace of fortuitous happenings that is extraneous to my image. I first provoke the accidents and then I guide them, and in this dialogue between surprise and control I graft the contradictory logic of different formulations...
The water mass has receded to the limit of the visible. The sludge remains among the wrinkles of the mud. Here and there a few puddles, where all that wants to stay alive is concentrated. Forced together by the limits of this temporary universe different shapes whose lowest common denominator is the common swarming. Rocky boulders separated by thin layers, agate veins, quartz knots, trunk knots, jumps and digressions between syntaxes of different languages.
What at the beginning is a coincidence when around it the painting begins to develop, the fortuitous marks the rules of its internal logic and this becomes an inescapable necessity.
Journey
Usually one thinks to painting as to an object in space. Yet paintings deal with time, too; you do not encompass it all in one eyesight. One gives it a certain general look; then the eye concentrates on some focal point following paths set by the artist, slowing, accelerating, bouncing against an obstacle, penetrating the virtual surface or being rejected by it, thus adding a rhythmic quality that expands in time, along with the modulation of space. The painter programs the travel itinerary in unchartered territories that the reader-tourist can follow to progress through the emotions provoked by the successive discoveries. The penetration of the gaze within a misty or crystal-like spatial illusion are minutely orchestrated, but the observer is free to interpret what he sees, in function of his perception, culture, or familiarity with the language used by the author.
He way to make us think about ourselves within ourselves, while we contemplate our similarities and differences with the others. A work of art from being an object to be seen in a determined space is projected in time, as after a superficial glance one begins an unconscious analysis of the centers from where the energy radiates. And the rhythm of the exploration change, adding cadenzas to the modulations of space and the provoked waves of subliminal thoughts.
Dreaming to levitate, supported by our thinking, without mysticism, but with faith in that part of themselves that cannot be detached without the need of sleep to understand, but understanding does not know that, if you notice something that becomes part of you and there is nothing to add. Then one day you travel on a dusty road as usual. It seems as though you do not meet anyone, but instead you are seeing their transparent bodies and you see everything else. You enter into things and you see their opposites as well as their similarities, and you try to explain them to yourself, that what you see is not a symbol, but the thing in itself, or rather the same and the other, and its denial, its friend, and its enemy. I met her by a chance that was not a chance. She was waiting for me and I was waiting right at that angle that I knew, and as I discovered the forms for the first time, I felt as though I had known them forever, affirming and negating, revealing every veil that has a different color - and as though in a mirror you see yourself. And perhaps understanding that there is nothing to understand...
Emotion
And then, the role of emotion. There are great works that don’t rely on the impact that emotion have in determining our reactions. One can find mediocre paintings or sculptures that appeal to our immediate feelings by the drama of the chosen subject, and in spite of their dubious quality they could make you laugh or cry. For me the importance consists in formulating a kind of world that expresses itself through itself using its vocabulary, grammar and syntax, not only through t the subject of the representation. Of course, some elements of the subject contribute to the reading, but Representation should not become Literature; the elements of the story must be translated in expressive forms to justify their presence. Painting acquires its value by using its specific tools, speaking of itself through itself. It reveals the mechanisms of the Magician’s top hat exalting its poetical sense, without being satisfied by simply using them to make a rabbit disappear.
Once the painting is completed, it does not change. The spectator always changes. So then, what is painting? Do we all respond equally in front of the same painting? But don’t we have extremely different reactions from one another when we are in front of a natural scene like moonlight, sunsets, storms - and someone dreams, another smiles, another cries? Landscapes, poets, works of art seem to carry a special secret message for anyone of us, in harmony with our deeper self, blending with the stratifications and alchemy of OUR own emotions.
Contradictions
All my paintings, no matter when I created them, have a point in common: the insertion of an element that contradicts the rest of the composition as if motivated by another conception of space, by a different culture, or as part of a totally different work. Yet I need it, and to understand their function is essential to understand my work through its multifaceted appearance.
Such an approach makes it difficult to decide to which movement or style I belong.
My iconographic sources are to be found in the multiple artifacts that have been created by humankind belonging to different cultures and different historical moments. Each one was true, yet each one was different. So… none was truer than other…
As I ran into them during my random peregrinations through the world I was fascinated by their differences, all valid within their contest. Being an outsider to those different worlds, I wasn’t able to relate to their most essential functions, yet they provoked in me so many different associations of ideas, reacting to unusual color and tone relationships, that I could rearrange in my own vision of space, relating, or in contrast, with it.
This interest progressively took shape within me during a long time, but I became aware of it all of a sudden: In the spring of ’64 I was working in the studio. Rose colored rays entered through the window that opened onto the terrace. The reflections moved shadows and lights on the walls, and I was staring at it distractedly. Absence of thoughts is so suitable for discovering in oneself or around oneself something that is waiting to be found. My peripheral vision suddenly forced me to turn around because it had noticed a painting unknown to me. It took me a moment to realize that what I had seen as one was a group of different sized canvases leaning against the wall.
Each one was partially hiding the other, but the visible sections seemed to be struggling to penetrate and integrate into the other, to find an alternative unity, to compare its plausible credibility with that of others, and upset the previous balance by introducing its own rhythm, its proper definition of space. For me, it was a revelation of what I had searched for years, to give a sense to the visual discontinuities and contradictions of style. I could include the many cultural references that my memory had accumulated by gathering sediments of contrasting cultures that survive within us.
In a canvas that created the illusion of a specific space, I introduced elements hinting to other ways to interpret what was being formulated, and their suggestion of another space, another truth was enough to create a shadow of a doubt in the observer, and multiply the suggestions of different worlds equally credible. Their elements were interwoven to occupy every space. For a while I tried to enhance the discontinuity beyond my conscious control, so I covered the finished portion of the work with a piece of paper. I put it aside until I forgot what was in the hidden part, and I painted on the empty space. I wanted to hear the dialogue between the two elements, free from my control.
My Contradictions make me consider my work not as an abstraction, but as a stimulus to multiple interpretations and different truths, each one credible in the context of the culture that elaborated them. Some of them interested me for associations of ideas, others for their shape, color and tone, similar or in contrast with nearby forms. I will try to describe some of them:
Contrast between an amorphous matter and its unknown rules of behavior that invades - or is invaded by - a rigorous Euclidean geometry, that distilled from Chaos some essential rules - conscious reasoning confronted by subconscious emotions
The square: space defined by four orthogonal lines: causing visual reversals of space. solid obstacle or open window? Then is the background represented by the white, or the pink, or the black? And those detritus of colors, and forms… are they leftovers of a preexisting structure that Wind and Streams erase, or cells of a new expanding world to replace the previous one…
…I remember once when some filiform shapes had been suggested - in a very different context - by the legs of camels in the Sahara Desert…
Associations of ideas: Villages destroyed by the flames, along the horizon line of a painting of Ieronimus Bosh… the levity of Japanese Kites…transferring them to my canvases I contradict their physicality by a surrounding margin suggesting that the illusions you see and imagine are just a screen, hiding what is behind…
A golden island, suggesting a fragments of a Byzantine pastiche - is transformed by a process of erosions into floating islands that the current displaces at random to discover different islands to be absorbed or obliterated…
Contrast between Nature and Geometry; here a precise limited number of rules creating order and certainties, there a gothic tale, humid origin, infinite number of rules blending in unknown harmonies mushrooms molds clouds waves water springs - that a thin thread of immense power immobilizes them in a multiple chess game where only the chessboard is left, abandoned castle to be reabsorbed by the elements into the Eternity of Nature…
These are considerations about specific paintings that I have done, now the reader can imagine them...
Structures
I used different compositional structures: centripetal - centrifugal radial, layered, compartmental. The latter are structured in three or four elements.
The three-element compositions propose three possibilities of reading: in the first, orchestrated on the scheme thesis - antithesis - synthesis, the first compartment, well divided from the next, is placed with this in provocative contradiction while the third represents in a certain way the interpenetration, and pacification, of the two themes. The second is set on reading 1.2.3, which, as in the musical beat of time 3/4, uses three different notes which, following each other, create the chord. Both readings are based on a writing that moves from left to right, in a manner normal to the eye of a western spectator; and once the right limit is reached, one returns to the beginning, that is, to the left.
The third, instead, is the classic triptych: the central element is echoed by the two lateral elements, a radial structure, centrifugal or centripetal, starting from, or returning to, the center.
But the multiple structure that I prefer, to which I return in different periods and in very different formulations, is the one with four compartments. The beat is now symmetrical: 4/4: the eye jumps from one box to another, and the motion continues in a circular way without interruption. And as a wagon wheel creates friction to its pivot, and you feel that something different from the peripheral motion happens at that point, so the imaginary rotation of the eye around the meeting point of the four elements tends to crumble, allowing the escape of small elements, let's call them cells or gems or insects or reality of another picture existing below this, introducing a further possibility of reading the already obvious differences that the four units have created. In some paintings, the system is further upset by a diagonal fracture, which suggests in a fairly realistic way that the painting actually results from two compositions in which one, torn, partially hides another. Yet another demonstration of how I avoid the systematic: even on a structural mode that I have established, and I feel the need for a further contradiction.
In essence my paintings are divided into pieces to emphasize the importance of an image according to the image next to it.
Fractures
My juxtapositions, or contradictions, temporal (temporal or cultural) are always inserted in a spatial proposal: the ambiguity is that the spectator operates the synthesis in him, or that he enjoys the proposed question mark: which space to believe in? Or which of the proposed cultural references does the author really believe in?
Let's consider at this point the aesthetics of the ruins; Ruskin's romantic approach to Venice, with his Stones of Venice. What we enjoy of what we see: The work as originally created - or the work of time on this one? Or the synthesis of the two? The two surviving columns [of the temple of Apollo] at Didima and the intensity of the void around them, which the eye would like to fill - or an ideal reconstruction of the temple of Apollo? And what effect would it have (compositional, emotional) to place these elements in a totally different context?
This is the most intimate motivation of my provocations. The perception that this is the true image of the world in which we live, bombarded by stimuli of very different valences; and it consciously reproduces what time or chance creates, when a 16th century fresco crumbles, discovering the underlying 13th century one; and it is the combination of the two, plus mold, that we enjoy.
But in these contaminations between the work of man and that of time there is something else, whose function I examined after a trip to the great altars, and the gigantic statues, of Nemrud Dag, in Turkey.
Fortunately, there was no one, neither guides, nor tourists. Only the wind. I was taken with a great sense of sadness. I found myself in a great baroque field of death. Here a king, of not even greater importance, believed that he found the immortality of memory in the grandeur of the work. And the great heads that have fallen to the ground look at you with desperate, increasingly dull eyes. The essence of the stone takes over, more and more important, the work of man. I recognize - still - his hand; but for how long? How long will erode, lichens, fractures make that face more intense - until the shape - rock dominates everything?
And I thought of another process of nature, the opposite of this one; when a stain, a cloud, a whirlpool of the current or a fracture of a stone suggest a face, a body that for moments is more intense, more realized, more constructed in its making, than this sculpture in their undoing due to the same forces; and surely there is a meeting point.
In these considerations is the explanation to some anthropomorphic images of mine, especially those of the mythological series: and certainly this is the reason behind Akhenaten's face in Bacchus, Akhenaten, the Bacchants, and the white spaces that recreate the illusion, in the lower part, of people's legs and horses in the Battles of Paolo Uccello; and many other paintings of the same group, where the bodies seem to be created by moving forces and where for an instant, like clouds, like water, they create almost by chance the illusion of a human form.
Interpretation
There is always a gap between the actions of others and our interpretation of them, just as our gestures and words are read differently from others, depending on their mood, moment, culture. We do the same thing ourselves, interpreting through our parameters what happens around us. But the other could also be ourselves, in the oscillations of the pendulum that happen in the course of our life, or even from one moment to another; oscillations between instinct and culture, time and emotions that reasoning organizes acting as a bridge with the intuition that guides you, modified by the different cultures with which you come into contact in the course of our life.
What is Painting
Painting is a tool to understand Nature beneath appearances, disregarding the scientists eye and using the poet’s, in search of those mysterious rules that conduct her marvelous harmonies, being illuminated by a minimal fraction of them, to be used in one’s personal methods and personal interpretation of the surrounding world…
…and if one forgets his fundamental aim to blend imagination and tools and oneselves for the invention of possible worlds, then everything becomes fashion, decoration, illustration; or, if the attention shifts from the form to the content-subject, the result is information, like a newspaper article that explains by images instead of words, totally disregarding the form that expresses them…
Multi-cultural references
Every cultural transformation follows a logic of its own, that explain and legitimizes the new approach; yet there are other possibilities as logic as the new ones that when applied to another context - historical, cultural - have the same flavor of truth. Sometimes the rhythm of time seems to accelerate; different truths coexist, and each try to prevail over the other. Even in painting we undergo a bombardment of images that pass quickly to provide the information without allowing the time to be seen, confusing the observer in a rising tide of different and contrasting emotions. And I intend to represent the coexistence of different worlds that try to assert their own message; and this direct comparison of diverse systems underline the apparent lack of logic of something that when seen from far regains its unity on a superior level, that is the synthesis of the opposites.
Maybe I am using a code that is too complicated as I create my multi-lingual vocabulary without foot notes, and assemble multiple fragments that sometimes permit a precise association of ideas, sometimes hint to the vagueness of dreams; and oscillating between the obvious and the mysterious delegate their interpretation to the form or to the content, without refusing an historical, literary or naturalistic contamination. In some of my works the couples of opposites are more evident: a small element of compressed energy is embodied in a vast, sullen surface that in its expansion suggests earth, sky, water in a metamorphosis that is influenced by the mood of the observer; growing cells, colonies of insects. veins of the earth, air into dust into water, precious stones or constellations, matter that becomes movement or crystallized immobility. Seldom do I use forms that although derived from an urban reality remain connected to their original function. Their relationship is in the way the story is told: a speech on the impossibility of explaining; themes that begin to develop and are interrupted abruptly before reaching their natural conclusion; forms that are replaced by others that fight for a space to expand - and if one prevails the narrow space left to the defeated antagonist charges itself with compressed energy. The exterior appearance of these mineral-vegetal wastelands is modified by ruins of the human works transformed by time into lapidary stones, or geometrical partitions that subdivide the space in intellectual renderings of natural occasional fractures. Chromatic fragments, maybe old mosaics dispersed by the storms and the centuries, interrupt the stratification of the sedimentary rocks created by ancient seas.
Periodically I alternate textures that stress the appearance of the painterly surface with ambiguous optical illusions, using the color in a magical sense. This alternation of modes provides me with combinations where the illusory fiction of a non-existing matter counterpoints the planes of the real one, itself wounded by strikes of light.
Space
Defining space through painting: At the beginning we can play at random with it - we can call it experimenting with space - then, as the painting begins to get organized, what was fortuitous sets the rules of its own inner logic, and this becomes an inevitable necessity.
When the composition of a painting focuses on movement, and this becomes the object of the representation, and is studied and analyzed as such, not as a symbol to help the development of a tale (as it happens with primitivism, expressionism, or in the refined indicator-sign of the Byzantine) the traditional composition is transformed, its parameters overthrown. The empty spaces are used in a less planned, more fragmented fashion; the figures lose their massive solidity as the voids decompose their parts with greater ease. They are less identifiable as they undergo deformations that are superfluous for the composition, as they are functional to the description of movement, therefore suppressing those adaptations of forms that integrate figure-ground in a continuum, symbol of the Absolute.
The revolution of the painterly space operated by the Italians during the first Renaissance began in Siena, with their sinuous lines materializing movement; then the Florence school captured the light with the Chiaroscuro and revolutionized the composition by introducing geometrical perspective. This determined a transformation where illusion of a form combines itself with a real form; trapezoid shapes replace the straight edges of vertical and horizontal, and a triangle represents simultaneously itself, and two parallels running towards infinity.
The space of Picasso is realistic. Examining his paintings, it is easy to construct a three-dimensional model because one can visually measure the interior dimensions. His is a Euclidean geometry, as all the great figurative tradition of the west. The space of Paul Klee is ambiguous and poetic, so that the images proposed by his figurative mode float into unreal dimensions.
But it is just this unreality that becomes the pictorial reality that the painter controls like a fluid, whose density can be changed at will. For me this is an important concept; not only the painter guides subconsciously the eye of the observer as it migrates right and left and up and down, but also in its penetration into the skin of the painting or its bouncing back as it hits the hardness of the surface. The representation becomes a membrane stretched between the observer and the infinite, creating variations that transform subtle air into cloud, water, ice, diamond. The velocity of the glance’s penetration changes as it meets a surface that absorbs or refuses, becoming steel, glass, cotton. You enter the space, and the timing of the absorption sets the rhythm.
Technique and Vision
I always thought that the painter's hands should be trained to represent whatever image the mind would see or imagine. Technique allows to represent, create the visualization of something through the interaction of brain and hands, vision is the search for which structure have different forms in common, the general rule that nature applies to different objects, regardless of their formal differences. The result is your building block that you assemble according to the many emotions, thoughts, experiences that have been shaping one’s personality and life. It is the analysis of all that surrounds us, but not stopping at the recognizable representation of what it is. It is an understanding of the structures, of the universal rhythms that one can discover in all that exist, a tree, a rock, a splash of paint, a procession of termites all obey to common rules of gravity, statics, dynamics, attraction repulsion. Even a liquid spilled on a piece of paper creates patterns controlled by the same laws, gravity, surface tension, evaporation, acceleration. Nothing can one represent that is not real, it is a more intimate way to look at reality - but when you are permeated by these universal laws, that drive at the same time emotions, planets...your experience, visions remembrances combine the in a different way, other associations that are caused by your inner self, totally different from the building stone, but intimately related to them, by sharing the same, universal rules. Abstraction does not exist, whatever form one can create is based on something preexisting, put together in a different way.
Geometry
Geometry! how few are the rules we have to rationally define space, if we compare them with the millions of rules that allow the infinite variations imagined by Nature! What complicate calculations we would need to measure all the forces that have determined the shape of a pebble! This secret geometry inspires me in distributing my forms and structures at random trying to discover the secret of their harmony. The hazards that has scattered around evoke dreams and infinite possible developments. Their visual clues hint to forces that underlie our convictions, while we are unable to unwind their intricacies. These forms in their apparent confusion contain in germ all the others that our fantasy can extract and develop, eager to acquire the meanings that their form can evoke and use them in a sentence where they can be the subject, the verb, or the object itself.
A sign requests an extreme simplification in order to be effective, because it needs to suppress any secondary meanings. It does not matter what kind of red a red circle is if it is used in a one-way street sign, and this has the same meaning in all languages. Similar rules apply to ideograms, and different kinds of handwriting don’t change the meaning of the message.
Yet if to these simplified forms we add a pre-established meaning we enter the realm of symbols.
If then instead of interpreting what the message says we examine how the deformation of the shapes detaches itself from its archetype, we understand how that change can become the real subject and how, in moving away from the sign and the symbol, it ascends to the dignity of independent language. NOW we are in the realm of Abstraction, both in case that it remains close to the original literal meaning, or if it widens to include on the same level all the secondary associations of ideas that the power of forms carries with itself. This is the very language of paintings in its visual form, liberated from any literary temptation.
Memory
Our memory stores the emotions and dreams that become the building bricks of our work. They are the essence of what surrounds us, an understanding of the universal rhythms of nature: a tree, a rock, a splash of paint, a procession of ants - they follow the rules of gravity, dynamics, attraction, repulsion - we create images that represent a more intimate way to look at reality - if we follow the universal laws that drive planets, emotions, visions, remembrances reassembled in different ways guided by associations caused by our inner self, different from the original building stone, but intimately connected to them.
I try to use different vocabularies, different grammars, to visualize reality, under its different aspects.
Layers
Palimpsests: the monks were writing on parchment. Parchment was rare. They were scratching away what was there before and write again. And on, many and many times. Greek tragedy turned into gospels and bibles and comedies and tears - in a labyrinth of half erased words, different languages, conflicting thoughts.
My Palimpsests: action of time on a space, illusory, ambiguous, real? Subsequent modes of different thoughts - possibilities - next to one another in space, or in time (in your mind, like a sequel of probable truths).
Still to explore - the Skin - (a surface that is created by what it hides below) - or a diaphanous membrane that veils the illusion of an illusion)...(and time dissolves some parts replacing them with other fragments - of thoughts, of matter - calendar-watch of moments gone... and the total image is born, recuperating the scattered pieces freezing them in a place that pretends - for an instant - to have stopped the continuous becoming of things...)
And the Skin again: opened, thorn, wounded unveils another distribution of what is real; and lifting this Real another arrangement appears, so different again and so on and on through the layers of reality, and they are the mirror of the stratifications of conscience, culture, will, vision, history...Possibilities of constructions of space and discontinuities where the mind can wonder, explore the reality of dreams and the dreams of reality...
A landscape of fairies, made of veils that the breeze moves (or a mist, thinner and thicker) revealing leaves and flowers that do not exist but might - birds, feathers, dragon flies that don’t exist but might - floating, moving along random paths, without plans, targets, desires – just driven by the joy to exist...
Someone entered the painting. By entering it became the painting. The Source springs From the Caryatides hands. The source is the Mother Goddess, The harmony of the two realities... Someone reentered the painting.
A crumbling fresco can uncover another, a different world can appear, with different rules, forms, allusions and illusions. Two different worlds can then coexist, and yet each one carries its own truth. And us, the observers, are confronted with both of them at the same time, and a third world, another possible truth, can begin to take shape in our mind. And... What if the ancient fresco, or painting, or vision, would reveal, in its disappearing process, a more recent world, that would upset our sense of time? But is it not life itself - with its different layers of beliefs, contrasting cultures, affections, statements - to assemble these continuous discontinuities? Isn't it the message conveyed by Pirandello in his plays?
Contradictions have always fascinated me and represent the essence of my work. They can be provoked by differences in style, mood, techniques, cultures. A painting seems to hide another one, that appears here and there. Cracks of the outer skin. Deeper layers can exist. Or maybe not. Figurative - or not: possibilities of associations of ideas successively denied by the successive layers; stratifications of forms, stratifications of the mind. Hypothesis of possible opposite, coexisting worlds.
Island: Is it what remains of a continent? Is that as the movement is condensed the energy increases? The smaller the entrance, the more frenetic becomes the crowd of ants that want to reach their city underground.
A fragment - is it negative? Positive? Future? Past? Is it what is left or what will grow? Expansion, or Compression?
Stratigraphy of cognitions, sparks of remembrances, reorganized in a space that is not their own.
Inlay: a rip in the curtain, a brutal tear that uncovers, or discovers (or generates?) other realities that wiggle like cells or bundle up until frenetic motion becomes immobility.
Hypothesis #1: Under the skin there is a world in motion - only by cutting the skin we discover it, so different from the surface.
Hypothesis #2: And a second, deeper, cut? Is there, under the first layer, the proposal of another possible world? and under this, one more and one more?
Microstructures widespread or swallowed by other coexisting organizations but impervious to dialogue (at least in appearance). At the meeting points, the struggle for the conquest of space, or to assert its poor material- where it is gold or rags - the eroded edge advances, backs away, abandoning the debris, opening like a wound, healing like a scar. It acquires its own life, with an independent rhythm from the forces that created it.
Titles
I sometime take a long time to find my titles. The general idea is about the harmony of the forms, and the suggestions they create being close to something visually, or emotionally, experienced in the past. The sources can be many, and the purpose of the canvas is to blend them together. But the final result can carry many more associations of ideas, possibilities and memories. I am giving my titles when I become a spectator myself, some explaining my reaction to this new object, or in counterpoint with it. Specifically, Expansions Contraptions hints at the very instant of suspension, where it uncertain if the original form is breaking up in hundred pieces leaving a void space, or if attracted by a centripetal force they create a new structure that populates the empty space. But what the object was - or will be - that will be determined by the observer, based on his-her’s personal experiences. The original association can in time change, and one sees the painting as a totally different one - and that is the fascinating element of what is called abstraction.
March of the Giants is related to many different sources. Greek Mythology, Greek pottery, balance of the whites, camel caravans in the desert; the legs partition the rhythms of the whites, I was also thinking of the spaces between the horses paws in the battle of Paolo Uccello; and the determining title came from the organ suite of Bach, which put all these elements together.
Maybe
From the rusty debris, from slow moving magma life rises. Or...a structure that was left its mark on the rising magma.
Maybe... The mantle of the shell, its folds, hiding and protecting, breathing its water life, expanding and contracting. Corpuscles vibrate, navigating the marine chart of the mantle, passing the capes, laying anchor in its coves. The Pearl at the center. Around it the town begins to form, the colors of the walls, the colors of the thousand-and-one nights to come.
Maybe... The Earth is expanding, A brief instant holds everything still, the exploding fragments ready to disappear out of the blue frame, the Pseudopods reach out from the frozen nucleus... An instant - and transformation will follow, and nothing will be the same, anymore.
Maybe...Just a painting...An illusion of space, a hint of a dream made of burned umber, Siena, Cadmium Red and Turquoise, and Titanium White.
Myth
Myth has attracted me for the veil it casts over its more intimate realities. Many of my works deal with it. Maybe my Mediterranean essence plays its role in it, maybe my contemplation of the sea that I see from the porch of my house, in Kythira. Certainly, their precise ambiguity, the difference - identity between Persona and Double and Mask inspire within me the ideal anchorage, blending and separating reality and illusion, evanescence and solidity, creating the final, superior moment of total unity.
Architecture Like Painting
I think to the relationship that a building has with the sky that complements its image, from the grays of the North to those that the South paints in many different blues. They blend or contrast the materials used by the architect. Ochre, pink, red, purple bricks, sandstones, marble, basalt.
Polychrome, striped or compact façades are thought in function of the air that circulate around them and the contrasts that the sun creates giving a crisp or soft or veiled quality to their reliefs. These sometimes design on the outside skin the shape of the inner structures or create a second façade, like in the Romanesque cathedrals, or use the outside for a multitude of bas-reliefs independent from the interior (the Indian temples) or simply dim or enhance the stripes of the Tuscan churches.
Polychromy upsets the real volumes suggesting multiple illusions of space, creating transparencies in the solid matter as if translucent parchment, creating presences on both sides of the wall.
Bursts of light, holes of shadow, positive or negative if seen from the outside or from the inside; rose-windows mediating between darkness and sky, more an eye-on-the-watch than a window.
Structures covered by thin incrustations that deny the volumes by playing on the surfaces transformed in a screen of light and color: Venice and its façades and their double in the water...
But the double façade of the Romanesque Italian churches is it also to be considered an incrustation? I rather think of it as a cage that captures the rays of the sun, and marks with the passage of the hours the variations on a theme orchestrated by Seasons and Time.
The lacework of the outer skin is projected on the underlying surface in a moving dance of shadows and light.
The Quincunx, the Greek cross inscribed in a square, symbol of superior completeness, is the base design of the Byzantine church design.
From the ground emerge a maze of columns, arches, twisted perspectives that end in corners of darkness. Above windows bring in light and measure; they are many, but order and structure is found, with four corners and five domes. Man has risen from the meanders of the unconscious to awareness and logic. Still above the dome rises, symbol of the sky and sign of Unity, carrying the ultimate expression of the structure while visualizing the ascent to a superior reality beyond the physical one.
Organic shapes, forms of ancestral remembering, rips, tears and scars of the surface are progressively replaced by light emanating from the center where pure form is generated, unknown to nature but being its essence. Generated by struggle and anguish it rises from it as the result and origin of everything, a clearer reality under the world of appearances, recessing into Infinity and coming back from it.
Shapeless matter is molded into the frames of the spiritual search, and the process inevitably creates storms and clearings, as the inner forces gain energy from compression, until the inner of the inner core establishes the balance of the opposites and makes The Invisible Visible.
Further thoughts
Painting: improvement of oneself through experiences of the senses, of deeper perception.
Trying out the possible combinations between the inner and outer world, and presenting the different possibilities of combination according to your experience.
Art brings to the surface hidden or forgotten thoughts, generosities of which we were not anymore capable since our childhood. In this resides its ethical sense: to promote the growth and awareness of hidden parts of our Ego.
The constriction of the frame, the freedom of the wall - free spaces and embanked spaces in painting.
It happens, in my paintings, that a small detail changes the reading - of spaces – priorities - meanings.
My painting cannot be defined by the dress it wears, but by the kind of space it creates.
A canvas can pretend to be what it wants to be...
Another disguise of the same idea, this painting reveals what the other paintings are hiding.
Eclecticism, at the service of my discontinuities of space and time.
Discovering the existence of the minimal transforms the reading of the whole.
An image is univocal if figurative, pregnant of all possible associations if abstract. In both cases it represents basically itself, beyond the subject or the subjects.
I am interested in multiple readings caused by the mode of representation.
I don’t try to explain, I like to create question marks.
A Poem
Mythologies ?
Someone entered the Painting
And belongs to it...
The Source is in the Hands of the Caryatids,
The Source is the Mother Goddess,
Harmonious in her two different realities...
Someone entered the Painting
Tracing Paths of Fire and Deep Nights
Contrast between Physiology and Emotions,
Furthest Disguise
Of the same Idea
That in this Picture reveals
What in the others is hidden.
A Day: Tropical Sky
Pretext to a Graphic Dance
For the Birds of the Sea
With the Calligraphy of their Bodies
filled with Signs
The Pentagram of a Picture
That pretends to be the Sky.
From the Rusty Ruins
of the Magma that slowly progresses,
Life reappears... Or...
A Life that was
Still leaves its sign
On the Magma that all overwhelms.
Maybe...
The Mantle of the Oyster
In its folds
While breathing hides and protects
The Water of Life.
It expands and contracts
The Corpuscles vibrate
As they navigate her Marine Charts,
Passing the Capes,
Anchoring in its recesses...
In the center, the Pearl.
Around her the City is organized
The Walls reflect the Colors,
The Colors of the Thousand and one Nights
Yet to come.
Maybe...
The Land is expanding,
An instant is protected by Silence
As the Fragments are getting ready
To trespass the Limits of the Blue.
And the Pseudopods
Venture out of the frozen Nucleus...
And Nothing,
Nothing will ever be the same
Again.
Maybe... Maybe it is only a painting,
An Illusion of Space,
A hint of a Dream,
Made of
Burned Siena,
Raw Umber,
Cadmium Red and Turquoise,
And White,
Titanium and Zinc.