Manifesto

The message encoded by the artist is by no means unique or static. His art, which is constantly evolving, can change from one period to another, and indeed even from one moment to the next. As it evolves it can take on multiple meanings, depending on the interpretation given to it by the various viewers (especially if they belong to different historical and socio-cultural contexts), but even by the same individual.

The work of art thus breaks away from its state as simply an inert object and acquires multiple meanings. The context-based message produces direct, immediate effects on the viewer’s behaviour, vigorously freeing itself from its identity as simply a neutral “object” and imposing itself as an agent capable of affect the minds of those who receive it. By creating a dialectic of mutual involvement and communication between the artist, the work of art and the viewer, the “object” acquires a social role: not only is it able to shed light on the human environment to which it belongs, but it can also create a series of interactions, outlining a “social life” and a “biography” of its own (A. Appadurai).

The “traditional” viewer, as the recipient of the message and the beneficiary of the work of art, tends to play a purely passive role. On the contrary, my conception of art aims to overcome this passivity and turn the viewer-user into an “actor”.
By creating pictorial panels of various sizes, which consist of combinations of paper, iron, copper, brass, magnets and wood, the artist puts the viewer in a position to “play” with movable, interchangeable elements as though they were pawns. This means the viewer can create their own work of art on each occasion. The two-dimensionality of painting and the three-dimensionality of sculpture are enhanced and enriched by this modularity and polychromy. The viewers thus give form to an original artistic sequence, which will last as long as they wish, composing and juxtaposing their own visions, their own inner journeys, their own traumas, and their own mysticism and their own very personal forms of equilibrium and abstraction, following the thread of their memories. Like this, they can transpose their own personal journey through life directly onto the symbolism of the pictorial work. This means there is no longer any standard interpretation, or any pre-established and induced key to understanding. At this point, the multiplicity of meaning in the work reaches its culmination, spelling out a message written with an alphabet that is re-created and that changes on each occasion.

This is not just a search for a new visual language, or for a new form of communication, but rather for a new individual and/or collective cognitive perspective. By interacting with the work of art, viewers enter into contact with their own atavistic past and with what we might refer to as their “future memory”, which formulates a premonitory message in an act of almost personal self-divination: the pictorial modules become like tarot cards that reveal one’s own unconscious.

The creative (and re-creative) act compresses the intersection between various driving forces that act in unison. It is a playful activity performed on a painting-chessboard in which one can move the pieces of one’s life in a theoretically infinite number of ways. It gives a powerful psychoanalytic impulse as an instrument of self-knowledge, for the destruction and reconstruction of the ego. And, lastly, it is a therapeutic practice in the Socratic sense of a direct consequence of the attainment of the Self. The irreproducibility of this convergence in the work of art represents and typifies the fragmentation of the modern ego, like splinters of a mirror that nevertheless remain constantly interconnected.

The reconstitution of this lost identity in the pictorial experience and one’s interaction with the work of art can be brought about in the form of both an individual and a shared experience, as the creation of a new collective identity in various social configurations (as a couple, a family, and so on).

This experience brings with it a powerful theatrical component. The viewer, who becomes the creator of the painting, becomes an actor in a performance based not only on the encoding of an original message, but also on the body language of gestures, which ritually reproduces the theatre of improvisation that is life itself.

            The theme of the segmentation of the ego (“O my heart divided in two at birth, / how much pain I endured to make them one! / How many roses to hide an abyss!”, U. Saba) is a recurring element in my art. In other (unique, not user-configurable) works, the pictorial panels are subjected to a cold, surgical-like cut that breaks them down into countless thin splinters. These are then mixed, scattered, and reassembled in an unpremeditated manner, creating a pattern that is not rationalised in advance. The fragments end up overlapping, juxtaposing, or lining up, and for a moment they appear to come together in the same direction, but this is immediately broken by interruptions and obliquities. The print colours, oils, high-gloss varnish, and metal paints create momentary chromatic combinations into which the paper can be dipped, as in batik, four or five times. The painting acquires the look of an energetic, irregular weave of fabric, rising up from the ashes of past works, the decommissioning of which once again leads us into a votive dimension of otherness. The work that this process creates is as enigmatic as an attempt at exegesis of the divine, and is as spiritual as a mandala.

The language used to express this mystery is necessarily dual and ambiguous, wavering between recto and verso, light and shadow, brightness and darkness, paper and iron, positive and negative, good and evil. The compositional language of this interaction between the human and the divine is encrypted in the form of a dreamworld alphabet consisting of individual symbols, each of which has its own linguistic value. Sometimes inspiration comes from particular images, but more often than not it leads to a complex set of internalised symbols, a rich hieroglyph made up of combinations of solar circles, chessboards, labyrinths, floral elements, cups, and human or divine faces. The theme of nature rules supreme. The pictorial landscape is transformed into a subaquatic dreamworld that disinters threadlike inner fragments and weaves them into a new existential pattern.

Through the use of rollers, spatulas, brushes and pencils, the typical pictorial effects of monotype resemble the furrows carved out in soil by a plough, bringing to light memories that have been impressed over time and preserved like archaeological finds, almost as though they were fossil impressions.

My painting bears the hidden signs of a barbaric instinct, of a past that is dissected and relived in an instinctive, obsessive manner. The experiences of my childhood, which have become sedimented in my unconscious, are purified as they rise up above the waterline of mysticism.
In the end, I see all these fragments of memory dispersed in the world, preserved, brought to life and relived by new viewer-actors. And yet they remain bound together by their common origin, like filaments of a primordial energetic weave.

Similarly, as individuals, we all of us are unconsciously brought together in a spiritual and social web, as particles waiting to reconnect. Like atoms on a cosmic journey.