ABSTRACTION. ALL FEMININE

CONSTELLATIONS, MUSIC AND WARRIORS

Men on horseback often recur in the works of Marcelo Bottaro. They are symbols of speed and dynamism, like the machines of the futurist style, expressing all their muscular power in mad gallops towards the unknown, which seem to consume all of their energies, to the extent that they are transformed into galloping skeletons. The two pictorial subjects are the painter’s very own personal inventions. In the serenade under the stars, the representation of the guitar clearly shows the influence of Latin American culture, in which music is the life of everything.

FLEMISH PAINTING

Marcelo Bottaro has drawn his inspiration from the Flemish painting of Vermeer and the 17th century works of Caravaggio and Velazquez. He chooses the same compositional and pictorial technique as the Flemish master, even using the same pigments and, while always retaining his admiration, he reinvents them with a contemporary pictorial language. For example, he introduces a symbol of cosmic origin that he calls the boomerang, which represents mystical laws and in particular the law of cause and effect. In the work HOMAGE TO CARAVAGGIO WITH MANY CENTURIES DELAY he refers back to the celebrated painting THE CALLING OF ST. MATTHEW, created by Caravaggio in 1599 and preserved in the Contarelli Chapel of the Churches of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome. In this work by Bottaro, the play of light and shadow is extremely impressive, and just as in Caravaggio light has the function of directing the viewer’s gaze. The depiction of the faces of the protagonists and St. Peter is both clever and disturbing: simple smears of color are used, without expression, features or identity. The boomerang of course had to be there, under the diagonal in the top right. Bottaro’s decision not to represent the figure of Christ is mysterious. In the Caravaggio version, Christ’s arm is outstretched, recalling the famous scene of the creation of Adam.

LINES OF WATER. YEARNING FOR INFINITY

The sea painted by Roberto Braida is a surreal sea, a place representing a desired goal to which each of us yearns to go in our imaginations; it becomes almost like a desired frontier to reach after we have crossed the sea of experience. Braida creates a sea of a thousand different hues that creates an emotional atmosphere which, even though made up of bright colors, gives the observer a sensation of quietness of spirit, meditation and reverie. His pictures always appear to represent a yearning for infinity, a summation of limits, a pursuit of frontiers, a continual succession of the edges of things: of earth, of sea, of sky. That border dividing sea from sky represents a most complicated yet finite universe, problematic yet limited; the rigid line of the horizon, made of sand and marble dust, is dissolved in an immensely seductive metaphysical embrace. Braida paints the sea as he sees it with his eyes closed: it is no longer the human eye that is searching for depths and distances, but it is the elements themselves (air, water, earth) that are watching us, the image that is targeting us, the colors that are introducing us to their vision.

MOTORING ART: RAMPANT REDS

TRANSFIGURED ARCHITECTURES

These images by Carlo Cane are urban landscapes of imaginary cities. Enormous skyscrapers in gray tones with the consistency of metal, architectures deserted and abandoned. The space of the pictures feels as if it is “out of shot”, going beyond the limits of what we normally focus on, to become the center of a system of imaginary relations the key to which is purely geometric. Carlo Cane has a surprising capacity to raise up material walls, transforming them into authentic architectural spaces. He levels everything out to a zero degree of visibility, and then returns with photography as the point of departure for his reconstruction. The vision of the artist turns on the difficulties of living together, expressed in the burnt and often dramatic colors. The result is a sense of things worn down, lived out. The unique style deliberately employs dark colors, in order to make the past, so near yet so far, emerge in such as a way that even the skyscrapers are projected back in time. The works of Carlo Cane are invariably extra-temporal representations, of the beginning and at the same time of the end.