The signs of memory

The city, a blank sheet where to write, scratch, draw, remember...

When I walk through the city and I look at the signs on the walls, at first I feel unease; but then, I am immediately overwhelmed by indifference because of the total homogeneity and homologation of what they represent. They are too many, everywhere, and all the same! I hold them partly responsible for the lack of empathy, not just towards the viewer, but above all towards the city landscape. Nevertheless, few of them generated such a strong interest; not just among youngsters, but also among experts, the so called 'creativi affrancati" and image communicators. The New York Times wrote that "graffiti left the dark subway corners to explode in a global style of virtual images, invading the internet, design, fashion."

Alan Ket, the star of the movement known in the "80s as "graffiti out", is regularly invited to give speeches by museums, art galleries and universities such as Princeton and Harvard. Alessandra Farkas writes on "Corriere della sera" that he gets often hired as consultants by multinationals such as Atari, Moet et Chandon and MTV. It would be extremely interesting to hyper-analyze the Basquiat sign and Haring"s repetitive and convulsive feature. Both have become symbols shown in important museums and art galleries world-wide.

Nowadays, metropolitan graffiti have become the consistent scenario of our commuting and travel. As far as I am concerned, I find some of them beautiful. I could refer to some remarkable ones I have seen along the embankments of the Moldavia"s river in Prague. On the contrary, others are devastating and eye killing. I mean it! I don"t want to lose the ability to look and see, in the ocean of real and virtual images. I turn my eyes around and spot other signs, bare survivors almost lost to men"s eyes, almost suffocated by aggressive spray.

Through my long research, I always tried to transfer on my paintings the close relationship between text and image, the esthetic balance between senses and non-sense. This is the philosophy that inspired my professional work throughout the years.

Yes, I have always been fascinated by the signs on the walls. Even the natural ones, those due to unpredictable circumstances such as the unconscious violence of mankind, mixed with faded colors, season after season... Those beautiful informal and neofigurativi Ta'pies, Fòutrier, Kandiski... The paintings from Twambly remind us the old graffiti says Angela Vettesse in a remarkable article published by "Il Sole 24Ore", "those without style, or fashion, produced quickly with a simple contact with the wall". "They are scribbles created hoping for a dream to happen".

Over the years, I took pictures of many of those walls in various cities, in Italy, in Europe, in the US. I have clear in mind all those images, so unpredictable, unexpected, and dominated by a sense of absence. Those images, fascinating but misleading, seem to be telling us a lot but at the same are hiding everything. I take inspiration from those visual and mental imagines, at times when my mind has no traction and the signs on the paintings become childish, impossible dreams.

"Contemporary art is blind. Not only it has lost contact with reality, but above all lost the ability of seeing", reminds up Paul Virilio in his essay "The art of blinding". "In front of contemporary art, the observer finds himself in the same situation as one who enters a cathedral in the night, hoping to admire the windows".