11 April 2017
When the choice is to stay on the sidelines, not to be blended with a universe based on speculation and commodification of every aspect of the spiritual life, a man must be ready to pay the isolation that he had chosen.
After almost half-century since the beginning of my adventure as a painter, I have to acknowledge that I've been too optimistic in believing that in the end, in the artistic world, the important thing is always the work, the single work and the total work by which interpreting the true value of an artist.
Facts have proved me wrong. In a world of talkers, whores, thieves and opportunists, corrupt politicians, idiocies of all levels, chaos as a fact of life, in a world based on money extorted in any manner, it is so naive thinking about the possible evaluation of objective value beyond each convention. Where relationships, contacts, friends matter, that is, everywhere but particularly in the "Dolce Paese", you can align into a sort of artistic association or you are irretrievably lost.
I am very far from thinking that an artist has to shut themselves up in a obsession with his work, since my first exposures, in the 70s of the twentieth century, I have seen the abysmal distance among my way of looking at the painting, of understading art in general, and what i could see in exhibitions of Art and galleries. It is not just a diferent interpretation of the artistic experience but a precise Weltanshauung that put me back then and still puts me in a strong critical position towards the current way of understanding life and art. Moreover today, after almost fifty years, I can not help but note how everything is tragically worsened.
The decadence of the Western world is tangible. The inability to tackle any situation, to answer appropriately to what is happening inside and outside the western borders is under the eyes of everyone. We persist defending ourselves with the laughable weapon of rhetoric, with candles, with stayng happly together but helpless and astronished after horrific attacks, stupid faces imploring, lost and delirious eyes in extolling the alleged "values" of the Enlightenment, without being able to submit those valuese to a critical investigation more than ever necessary,and see how much of them it has been saved from the quicksand of an economic, blind and voracious capitalism and a horrible view of life that is flaunting the word freedom in a world of slaves, of an ad-induced need and of economic necessity created to enslave consciences. All of this happens while we do not want in any way contrast a silent invasion of millions of migrants, which simply as amatter of mathematics, they won't be more than an added burden on the already precarious western economy and they will eventually become the real problem for young people, today already struggling with the old Europe that does not offer them any future beyond the usual chatter. Nothing makes more sense. The reason, the pride of the West, has been lost into the sloth of two-bit politicians. Unthinkable an answer of collectivist kind, presented in various recipes in the past century, the politic experience of misunderstanding Romanticism was as you know, a tremendous apocalypse, and therefore we must be aware of popish follies, of South American kind and of optimistic demagoguery whose does not see and does not want to see beyond the end of their nose. As every aspect of existence, art of the twentieth century, controlled even itself by the desire of supremacy also in the artistic and cultural field of the United States (that counted bothing in these fields before the Second World War) and praised very often from Duchamp (horrendously misunderstood) until today, has been , finally said frankly, so little more than a ridiculous game for spineless and idiot adults.
The actual decline was already possible to imagine and predict it in every aspect after the first conflict the blindness of that time, typical disease of politicians with no future, has been the rule in the years that fallowed, despite premonitions of philosophers anf artists. Of disaster in disaster, neither the second world conflict, with enormous destructions, was enough to make people understand that rhetoric and "democratic" demagoguery could not prevent the decline toward an irreversible situation. Is it still possible to come back? The artist's job, in my opinion, is the strong investigation that disaster, the anthropological mutation of raging degradation, certify not the foolishness, the miseries, perhaps with mental meaningless ruminations, but the existential drama whitout losing sight of the link with the great, authentic tradition. What sense could have then the comedy of art we see around? And yet continue the old plays, the star system, the painful dramatization organized to move money from the finance, the ostentation of an alleged culture in the hands of speculation, funded with millions of euros from the public resources of "disabled" ministers, becouse considered an appendage of mass tourism, another rampant scourge of the time and unfortunately, unremovable?
Artists, however, instead of reacting, unfortunately, have preferred, and in large numbers, conformity, the eagerness to get to the ephemeral spuculative world summit. So it does not existed anymore for about a century culture, literature, thouht, critical vision, except in a few heroic figures of intellectuals, certainly not in those fools that we can see forever "linked", beaten in millionaire auctions, or in TV shows vainly verbose of no account. In such an environment, what encloses this selection of mine " Fifty works in fifty years"? An attempt to stop the time that elapsed, crystallizing it in works that are fundamental to me. There have been many painting cycles in years that i made, but it was not difficult to extrapolate from them some works that are like milestones of my career that was (and still being) not exactly easy.
And perhaps the time has come to throw these works like dice and crossing the Rubicon, taking position against conformism has resulted in the marginalizazion and isolation has been for more, misunderstood as arrogance, and this is not surprising in a land of opportunists and turncoats, where it is always preferred to be lined up and covered, while following the bandwagon or the fashionable trend.
From the first cycle dedicated to Melville, up to that of these days, I have had rich material to choose from the works presented in here, it will be possible to notice the strict consistency, even in the formal variety of individual works, to an ideal dictated that I had never abandoned to subject myself to the favorable opportunities of the moment. The works are under the eyes of everyone. The difficulty is to pass the barrier of mediocrity that boils down everything to money and shit. My work puts this goal: to show that it is possible in spite of everything, work at an art idea that it is not the result of fraudulent market cynism, but that is reduced not even at an exercise of useless decorative skills, a "laboratory metaphysical" bloodless and whitout future. Stubbornness is necessary to destroy the barriers of conformism, but that will just happen. An attitude of this kind has never been understood and even more unikely to be forgiven. Oh well, everyone has their own destiny. I therefore strongly believe really necessary a different reading of works and artists of the last fifty years or Art will be another aspect of the "Decline of the West" that we pretend not to notice, until disappear in the more deleterious academy, until becoming just a mere consolation of the collector bourgeois convinced, sheltered by his collection, that put together objects which can effectively tell the hostory of the spirit and of ideas and instead only tell a tragic pantomime of burdensome fictions through languages that barely hide anything. We are not yet quite fed up with all the junk passed off as "works of art" while we are about to succumb to the greatest invasion since the battle of Lepanto? Apparently not, if we glance at auctions where millions of dollars are moving for true regime nonsense. But how long they are supposed to live, and the art of the regime and the entire West? We are here, with our work, to testify.
After almost half-century since the beginning of my adventure as a painter, I have to acknowledge that I've been too optimistic in believing that in the end, in the artistic world, the important thing is always the work, the single work and the total work by which interpreting the true value of an artist.
Facts have proved me wrong. In a world of talkers, whores, thieves and opportunists, corrupt politicians, idiocies of all levels, chaos as a fact of life, in a world based on money extorted in any manner, it is so naive thinking about the possible evaluation of objective value beyond each convention. Where relationships, contacts, friends matter, that is, everywhere but particularly in the "Dolce Paese", you can align into a sort of artistic association or you are irretrievably lost.
I am very far from thinking that an artist has to shut themselves up in a obsession with his work, since my first exposures, in the 70s of the twentieth century, I have seen the abysmal distance among my way of looking at the painting, of understading art in general, and what i could see in exhibitions of Art and galleries. It is not just a diferent interpretation of the artistic experience but a precise Weltanshauung that put me back then and still puts me in a strong critical position towards the current way of understanding life and art. Moreover today, after almost fifty years, I can not help but note how everything is tragically worsened.
The decadence of the Western world is tangible. The inability to tackle any situation, to answer appropriately to what is happening inside and outside the western borders is under the eyes of everyone. We persist defending ourselves with the laughable weapon of rhetoric, with candles, with stayng happly together but helpless and astronished after horrific attacks, stupid faces imploring, lost and delirious eyes in extolling the alleged "values" of the Enlightenment, without being able to submit those valuese to a critical investigation more than ever necessary,and see how much of them it has been saved from the quicksand of an economic, blind and voracious capitalism and a horrible view of life that is flaunting the word freedom in a world of slaves, of an ad-induced need and of economic necessity created to enslave consciences. All of this happens while we do not want in any way contrast a silent invasion of millions of migrants, which simply as amatter of mathematics, they won't be more than an added burden on the already precarious western economy and they will eventually become the real problem for young people, today already struggling with the old Europe that does not offer them any future beyond the usual chatter. Nothing makes more sense. The reason, the pride of the West, has been lost into the sloth of two-bit politicians. Unthinkable an answer of collectivist kind, presented in various recipes in the past century, the politic experience of misunderstanding Romanticism was as you know, a tremendous apocalypse, and therefore we must be aware of popish follies, of South American kind and of optimistic demagoguery whose does not see and does not want to see beyond the end of their nose. As every aspect of existence, art of the twentieth century, controlled even itself by the desire of supremacy also in the artistic and cultural field of the United States (that counted bothing in these fields before the Second World War) and praised very often from Duchamp (horrendously misunderstood) until today, has been , finally said frankly, so little more than a ridiculous game for spineless and idiot adults.
The actual decline was already possible to imagine and predict it in every aspect after the first conflict the blindness of that time, typical disease of politicians with no future, has been the rule in the years that fallowed, despite premonitions of philosophers anf artists. Of disaster in disaster, neither the second world conflict, with enormous destructions, was enough to make people understand that rhetoric and "democratic" demagoguery could not prevent the decline toward an irreversible situation. Is it still possible to come back? The artist's job, in my opinion, is the strong investigation that disaster, the anthropological mutation of raging degradation, certify not the foolishness, the miseries, perhaps with mental meaningless ruminations, but the existential drama whitout losing sight of the link with the great, authentic tradition. What sense could have then the comedy of art we see around? And yet continue the old plays, the star system, the painful dramatization organized to move money from the finance, the ostentation of an alleged culture in the hands of speculation, funded with millions of euros from the public resources of "disabled" ministers, becouse considered an appendage of mass tourism, another rampant scourge of the time and unfortunately, unremovable?
Artists, however, instead of reacting, unfortunately, have preferred, and in large numbers, conformity, the eagerness to get to the ephemeral spuculative world summit. So it does not existed anymore for about a century culture, literature, thouht, critical vision, except in a few heroic figures of intellectuals, certainly not in those fools that we can see forever "linked", beaten in millionaire auctions, or in TV shows vainly verbose of no account. In such an environment, what encloses this selection of mine " Fifty works in fifty years"? An attempt to stop the time that elapsed, crystallizing it in works that are fundamental to me. There have been many painting cycles in years that i made, but it was not difficult to extrapolate from them some works that are like milestones of my career that was (and still being) not exactly easy.
And perhaps the time has come to throw these works like dice and crossing the Rubicon, taking position against conformism has resulted in the marginalizazion and isolation has been for more, misunderstood as arrogance, and this is not surprising in a land of opportunists and turncoats, where it is always preferred to be lined up and covered, while following the bandwagon or the fashionable trend.
From the first cycle dedicated to Melville, up to that of these days, I have had rich material to choose from the works presented in here, it will be possible to notice the strict consistency, even in the formal variety of individual works, to an ideal dictated that I had never abandoned to subject myself to the favorable opportunities of the moment. The works are under the eyes of everyone. The difficulty is to pass the barrier of mediocrity that boils down everything to money and shit. My work puts this goal: to show that it is possible in spite of everything, work at an art idea that it is not the result of fraudulent market cynism, but that is reduced not even at an exercise of useless decorative skills, a "laboratory metaphysical" bloodless and whitout future. Stubbornness is necessary to destroy the barriers of conformism, but that will just happen. An attitude of this kind has never been understood and even more unikely to be forgiven. Oh well, everyone has their own destiny. I therefore strongly believe really necessary a different reading of works and artists of the last fifty years or Art will be another aspect of the "Decline of the West" that we pretend not to notice, until disappear in the more deleterious academy, until becoming just a mere consolation of the collector bourgeois convinced, sheltered by his collection, that put together objects which can effectively tell the hostory of the spirit and of ideas and instead only tell a tragic pantomime of burdensome fictions through languages that barely hide anything. We are not yet quite fed up with all the junk passed off as "works of art" while we are about to succumb to the greatest invasion since the battle of Lepanto? Apparently not, if we glance at auctions where millions of dollars are moving for true regime nonsense. But how long they are supposed to live, and the art of the regime and the entire West? We are here, with our work, to testify.
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