POETICS

The collection “tough air for the pretence of an urban view” was born in 2008 as a result of a research I had done, till then, within an heterogeneous and exuberant experimentalism. Many have been, indeed, the artistic musical and personal experiences which led me there and here today. My first testing ground was obviously Arts School at Liceo Artistico Sacro Cuore in Padua where, thanks to the passionate and captivating teaching of some Professors, I realized that being and artist was the vocation of my life. Surrealism, Dadaism, Symbolism and Pop Art are the lands where I built my artistic vision. Mess, chance and the creative power left to agents located outside the author, the chaotic spontaneity of a production through the use of unconventional materials, surrealistic landscapes and Mirò’s unfinished movement are the theories that fascinated and influenced me the most, during my studying years at DAMS of Bologna. From here the creation of some series in which the artwork contemplated chaotic mixes of heterogeneous elements that got to unite into compact sets to which complex construction laws applied. In that same period, under the influx of John Cage’s compositions, I experimented the painting “by time”, where the possible mixes of materials and colors had to occur in a specific period of time, time that generated by itself and artistic moment. Yet in the following years I felt the need to introduce some distinctively figurative elements, so reaching an actual fusion of abstract into figurative, within an aesthetic which followed my personal and subjective rules. To achieve this I got engaged in various techniques for mixing primary and complementary colors which, taking the cue from Divisionism, flow into today’s creation of shades by overlapping and gradually removing coats of color. Besides, the choice of employing unusual materials led me to the creation of artworks which pour out from the canvas plane and hit the observer’s one, with a 3D invading powerfully the space and asserts its own independent existence. This experimentalism finds now its most complete expression in the application of polycarbonate plates over the canvas. Plates that I plastically “work”. Many have therefore been the phases through which my research took place, phases inspired by either sacred middle age art or by collage or by photography or by computer art. The art work of these days flow from a long and intimate re-elaborated version of various artistic influences: the urban views are transfigured and pushed away from the plane of reality through manipulation of shake and colours, to what becomes a surreal and fantastic and vivid vision of the world created by the man. The overlapping of multiple coats of colour and substance, corresponds to the multiple levels of which reality itself is made and its elements are combined following invisible but adamant rules, fixed time by time so to obtain an “organic” complex that becomes artistically expressive and independent. The presence of the third dimension, the amusement of assembling and overlapping, combining and dividing the different elements of reality is what brings me back to my inner child: to the joy and wonderful astonishment I felt when discovering the world around me. In fact, it is from a child that the title of my art work comes: one day on a train I heard a kid describing the window glass as “tough air”. So here is the polycarbonate plate as tough air, as solidification of that “I” that places itself between us and objective reality and transforms it. What I do hope everyone can gather from my art work is the stunning wonder for the world with its endless possibilities of being interpreted and with the freedom of re-creating and re-inventing it owned by children.