I paint, therefore I am
When the world ended at the pillars of Hercules (Atlantis being reduced to a vague reminiscence and its land to impracticable mud for ships) scarce was the power of painting and its will to define the colours of the rainbow.
The idea of a wholly experienced art able to conglobe the project of the painting with that of its frame-of walking with thinking, of acting with stillness-is not conceivable as a modal art in which the artist interprets a reductive task. For, by its own specific nature, art must invent new worlds, stir up radioactive behaviours and must not live on the already invented, on the stacked undertaking.
Apparently, a single person must have drawn a list of all the existing colours. One needs not the skill a psychoanalyst to understand the level of such a list: at a certain point, the colours collapsed upon the maker of the list. And, strangely enough, he continues to claim that these colours contrast with the greyness we find outside as compact reality.
The pigment is never neither glowing, nor polished, nor varnished. It has nothing that is loud, opaline, reflective. It always tastes of honey. In this respect, the saying is true that reads: through the narrow, steep path of the clouds, through the wooden rungs they climbed the poplar.
It happens many times that the matching of casual things implies the use of a casual colour: immense constructions with five colours that blur the sight. They are not distinct because thought refuses to be so. In this sense, schematic, precise, strict thought is abolished. The image has few limits, few boundaries; it is enlarged, fluid, perhaps it has to get moving, perhaps it has to give the impression of fragility.
The figurative is present roughly with a certain indifference to the finite detail: the individual expression, the precise features of a face or a vase become superfluous. Fixity and deformation prevail over the minute stroke. Such negligence is accepted because Matisse and Picasso cannot have been in vain, but also because abbreviation never reduces itself to incomprehensible stenography to the non-practitioners. But not only this. On discussing such a point one is not doing rhetoric, neither does one want to persuade by honeyed words. This is why this indifference is justifiable: it knows how to be appreciated and recognised.
In the future, will craft still rely on the hands, or will any feasible sequence have to rely on a machine? In 3001 will anyone be able to carve a little piece of wood or to decorate a wall by polished stucco? Perhaps things are not exactly like this. Several image eaters have understood that one can go on relying on painting-based cut and stitch, which needs neither electricity nor expensive equipments. The slap they give to the machine is: "otherwise, where would manual skill abide?"
Handle with care, this is the rule. To grasp a pencil, to draw a line; catching a colour is like catching a cricket with the hands: not to humiliate it do not close your hands. Lightness is like grace: it comes from above like a breath of wind.
Art of removing or frenzy of placing, culture of subtraction or practice of multiplication: the passage won't take place from stronger to feebler, from analysis to synthesis, but rather from the dispersion of the contents to their centrality, from the opaque materiality to the brightness of the pigment, from the digressing spark of the compact mirrors…
Going out, crossing the limit. Not lingering to analyse the walls: this is the moment to inquire its basements, and therefore to grip the visions in the whirlpool of a laic materiality with a psycho-physical prose that gives to the exit. The foundations thrown by the fathers are important, but the future must mark their interpretation.
One finger of Carlo Fontana indicates the rainbow; the other is earth-bounded, specifically pointing at the tail of the peacock: ascertained conquest of the dialectic principle, no rebellion spirit in the historical background. Prosaic narration is preferred to metaphor, redundant brush of the tongue. To force a line of the horizon or to deform a figure outline may mean the same thing: the projection of a wholly personal progress within the most intimate nature of the everyday.
There is no arsis, there is no catharsis. Everything slides into the only cauldron: "And as if at the hint of Pluto, all things, sacred and profane, mingle, and at his own will war are made, peaces, empires, counsels, tribunals, assemblies, marriages, treaties, alliances laws, arts, serious things, funny things; in a word all public and private matters of the mortals". They enter the heat of the pigmented nectar.