14/06/2026
pre opening exhibition view, and some friends making fuss of me; Bolsena, Sala Cavour, until the 27th of June.
thanks to everyone who helped❤️
below is the introduction, spurred by the polemic i had with a critic friend.
I am not a very spiritual person. While I respect greatly other
people's need for spirituality I couldn't care less if the land has got mythic or other roots.
I am drawn by the visual.
Perhaps glimpsed briefly in a particular moment when the light or the state of mind are right I can see something durable and beyond the fleeting impression
-a GRAND DESIGN.
If this is spirituality I am not aware of it.
This split second revelation (Bonnard's petit impression, a psychological jolt) is followed by painstaking effort to
analyse it. I am not interested in giving the general gist, symbol,
sublimation, final conclusion, painterly synthesis. More mess the merrier.
The feeling is build out of tiny
impressions that the miraculous human eye registers, ingredients set up in a particular relation to one another.
There is a desire to tell as much as I can about the subject, so a
Road, a Tree or a Cloud become a hero of the story.
I don't seek to re-create life. I try to give my picture a life of its own, equally rich as I see it from the close up and from
far away, over a period of time.
I value freshness in painting, but it can be self-indulgent and ultimnately treacherous.
Intimacy is the ethos.
Knowing joins in with Seeing. All my doubts, failures and hesitations are also painted in.
Nothing ages faster then the actuality, and the relevance of painting is in it being outside the pulse of the news of digital or any other era.*
It is the man and the world and metaphysical things.
Painting delivers it all quietly, demurely an your wall.
I don't-feel cut off, marginalized or in any other way antiquated. On the contrary - I am a part of a vibrant and now particularly varied scene, which lack of system would drive Clement Greenberg crazy. lt is the discipline of art that fascinates, creates legends and
generates fortunes.Not for the living painters, mind.
It takes lots of reshuffling in life to-be able to stand in front of the
canvas with the brush in one's hand. I may be a humble
practitioner, but I know that Painting is anything but.
An art curator friend said my painting is endowed with "slightly cynical romanticism" - but I wonder if
it is me?
It implies checking things with intellect, while mine is a round-eyed, gap-toothed (- soon to be no-toothed the way it goes, in a
preposterous homage to Vincent)
enthusiasticly honest-Joe
approach, worse! - a pig-headed evangelical non-conformist
solemn creed.
Cloth with stains it's all there is, but what stains!
*there are painters who respond strongly and immediately to the political news, particularly to social injustice or stupidity and evil, and I have nothing but admiration for them(case in question Celeste Dupuy-Spencer)I am not a very spiritual person. While I respect greatly other
people's need for spirituality I couldn't care less if the land has got mythic or other roots.
I am drawn by the visual.
Perhaps glimpsed briefly in a particular moment when the light or the state of mind are right I can see something durable and beyond the fleeting impression
-a GRAND DESIGN.
If this is spirituality I am not aware of it.
This split second revelation (Bonnard's petit impression, a psychological jolt) is followed by painstaking effort to
analyse it. I am not interested in giving the general gist, symbol,
sublimation, final conclusion, painterly synthesis. More mess the merrier.
The feeling is build out of tiny
impressions that the miraculous human eye registers, ingredients set up in a particular relation to one another.
There is a desire to tell as much as I can about the subject, so a
Road, a Tree or a Cloud become a hero of the story.
I don't seek to re-create life. I try to give my picture a life of its own, equally rich as I see it from the close up and from
far away, over a period of time.
I value freshness in painting, but it can be self-indulgent and ultimnately treacherous.
Intimacy is the ethos.
Knowing joins in with Seeing. All my doubts, failures and hesitations are also painted in.
Nothing ages faster then the actuality, and the relevance of painting is in it being outside the pulse of the news of digital or any other era.*
It is the man and the world and metaphysical things.
Painting delivers it all quietly, demurely an your wall.
I don't-feel cut off, marginalized or in any other way antiquated. On the contrary - I am a part of a vibrant and now particularly varied scene, which lack of system would drive Clement Greenberg crazy. lt is the discipline of art that fascinates, creates legends and
generates fortunes.Not for the living painters, mind.
It takes lots of reshuffling in life to-be able to stand in front of the
canvas with the brush in one's hand. I may be a humble
practitioner, but I know that Painting is anything but.
An art curator friend said my painting is endowed with "slightly cynical romanticism" - but I wonder if
it is me?
It implies checking things with intellect, while mine is a round-eyed, gap-toothed (- soon to be no-toothed the way it goes, in a
preposterous homage to Vincent)
enthusiasticly honest-Joe
approach, worse! - a pig-headed evangelical non-conformist
solemn creed.
Cloth with stains it's all there is, but what stains!
*there are painters who respond strongly and immediately to the political news, particularly to social injustice or stupidity and evil, and I have nothing but admiration for them(case in question Celeste Dupuy-Spencer)
