‘Chromatic Evanescence’, Monza, 14 April-11 June 2022
Epiphany of a melancholy fluid thought immersed in the irreducible difference of wandering colour. Intensity where each fragment of the image is a pure instant of regained time. Incandescent at an ultra-violet temperature, where the emotion is hidden behind an apparent flow of liquid nitrogen levitated in a gaseous state of atmospheric suspension. Fauve grammar, in the dissonant connections of the soul of a color-heat compressed to the limit of explosion, restless, never tame, in no way tameable within the reasons of decoration. Color is always in excess, it never rests, it is always displaced in a movement of approach or distance, of retention or expulsion of a mental vision, of a spiritual tension.
The color secretes the poison of doubt among the ambiguous fragments of adrift shapes still undecided whether to recompose themselves in a constellation of complete meaning. Always new dynamic balances, tonal relationships, complex harmonies in the chromatic polyphony of diffractions thrown into difference, into the unstoppable excess of rhythm. The subsoil of the soul is betrayed in a language of revelations and slips, of failed acts, of scraps, of symptoms of the melancholy of the time. Not mother scenes, not tragic acknowledgments of a past, but certainly symptoms of an unease, of the alluring persistence of eros as music of the cosmos, as an immobile engine of stories distant from official narratives.
In the company of one’s personal demon, without ever getting used to beauty, this too is the magic of art: going beyond the barred doors of the secret archives to capture all the intensity of the gaze beyond the volatility of the appearance of existence.
Simple expressions of complex thoughts, to destroy the impression and reveal the subtext of secret truths, while light is perceived with the eyes, color is understood with the mind, culture, memory among the shadows of doubt. Dawns of white nights, aurora borealis of electric color cast on scenes of bourgeois life, showing all the nervous tissue underlying the dynamics of social relations. A composure educated to an elegant formal construction allows the artist to arrange the scenes of life with a conscious and effective spatial direction according to a high-voltage symbolism within an apparent detachment.
A psychological theater of painting, a group representation where what really matters has already happened, or is in any case an off-stage that the artist manages to evoke with his painting which, like a blade, cuts through time revealing the complicated weave of intersections between persistence and escapes into the future, because color is always autogenous and autoptic. A retention of emotion drowned in color saturating every possible interstice, composing itself like a mosaic that hides the nakedness of the truth of transience. Dissemination of chromatic instants that flicker between apparent traces of imprecision. Fields crossed by dynamic trajectories, conjunctions and intersections of planes that alternate and collide to transform themselves into allusive, sinuous and slender silhouettes.
Refinement, measure, precision radiate the infinite possibilities of variation and application where the color is never pure pigment, but is a settling of thoughts that cross the consistency and density of the immaterial fibers of the shapes silhouetted over time. The stories evoked belong to a phantasmal dimension, they are set in an ineffability that elevates them beyond identity and actuality to place themselves in an allusive realm of shadows.
They are paradoxical chromatic wave-shadows, devitalized but persistent over time measured by the shadow of a time sundial. The figures are silhouettes that can be read against the light in the filigree of the world which is revealed only on careful reading as a certificate of existence, of authenticity of the passion shown with modesty. Interrupted stories transformed into pure evanescent aesthetic evocations. Excluded from any use, the material seems lost in the waves of chance, indifferent between wear and tear, but is rediscovered in the noble patience of the art of seeking a meaning between elegance and wandering. Letting oneself live, abandonment to the course of personal, family, generational destiny, already prefigured by a social metaphysics, finds an extreme edge of freedom in the wild overflowing of the emotion of art as an island perhaps not as exotic as the southern seas, but always free, like an escape from daily duties on a small island between the diversions of a river near home protected by fog. The true art of conservation has always been locked up in secrets.
Vittorio Raschetti