The stupid world of idols turns out to be a skilful murderer
of objects as well as a criminal system based on identity. Actors of their own
ideal and reality suitors, more and more identified with concrete everyday reality,
they compete in order to set things as objects of their own manipulation/adulteration.
According to a philosophy of global semiotics, painting does
not escape the web of signs that covers the world. Painting, by being a system
of signs, is writing in the modern conception of "text". Painting is a kind
of writing you do not read subsequently but combinatory.
Painting is not a transmission system. Far from claiming to refer
the object, painting is a non-instrumental writing, it is a non-functional writing,
it is a senseless game. What connects painter to semiotician is the study of
how the sign moves in the field of significancy, trying to foresee it in all
its vastness and extent.
Art in general and painting in particular, are the privileged
places of the iconic sense. Painting is the dis-concealment of the iconic sense,
it is a vivid sign able of creativity and innovation in respect of the dead
idolatrous sign.
While idols' world want to show off, to spread always something
to the eye, painting, instead, invites to lay down the gaze as laying down arms
and to shrik the dominion of "logical" organization.
To risk the object means put the world back into motion.
Art always goes beyond its moments of service. It is now time
for the artist to break the usual routine of commercial art and to launch painting
into a new life. Art must not adhere to the world - it is life, at most, that
shall follow the vision art suggests.
Art sets in a state of suspension both the obviousness of idolatrous
world and its ostentatious objectiveness, intended as rational system, reassuring
organization in order to dominate and to master things. Painting is a supposed
space, gravitation of signs. It overlooks new possible worlds which otherwise
are sacrificed.
In the continuous perfectioning of sense and in the never-ending
elucidation of word, the name will never treat the object fully. Word also,
even if charged with representing, gropes around the idea of signifying. Terms
are unsubstantial or, if you prefer, they are paradoxical silences. It is the
limit of language. The sense that escapes like the turtle that escapes, in its
fixed moving, Achilles' unceasing pursuit.
Painting is not performance, it is not a substitute for life
but it is a conception of the world. Painting, adventurous and of research,
causes knowledge to lose its bearings with lazy associations overstepping the
riddles of past, the current "melodism", and the picture of representation.
The artist avoids to produce mass, he or she shuns the effects
for ensemble, identities, body units by depicting portions of objects, unfinished
scraps, fragments of world.
The artist abandons the certainties of an ordinary viewpoint
by putting him/herself outside the object and its immediate sense. He or she
does not look at things more than necessary because they will inesorably remain
petrified as if they were under the gaze of a Gorgon.
Art and life as illusory alternation between Palingenesis and
Apocalypse. Art is a thrill of sense (of Pan in his emblematic figure), loss
of control, vacillation and perturbation of a world proudly withdrawn into itself
and embalmed in destructive identity, its utmost expression is the horror war.
Will the oppression of identity be unknown? The artist differs
from other men just because he or she does not know this oppression. It will
be possible to recognize identity as a survivor of the old world of oppression
only by setting the object free from the world of idols and putting it on service
of inventors. This because the future of the world depends on the other, artistic
vision of differing/deferral that does not keep up with contemporaneity.
