by Rosanna Albertini
Here I am, as the painter wrote, “the artists gets out of the way and leaves the viewer where once he stood.” I know Walkway is an image he reworked many times, each time a different painting in sync with a new state of his awareness of what he is doing. I use the present, as a sort of absolute time, separate from the fullness of things in which we loose the sense of our most intimate perception, and time steals our days. As I stand in front of the painting something from inside me is sucked in toward the silence of the white square at the end of the tunnel, so intense it is scary. The painting is, not the real physical place. Other humans have been there and marked their presence in graphic signs. The skin of the tunnel bears tattoos. Only in the painting they are indelible. But an un-human, vaguely pink-brown fog fights with the clarity of the white end. Forget reading. Only my soul can slide through the artist’s mental fog, and mine, maybe ours, in this damned 2026, where reason has lost her way. “life seeps in unintentionally, subliminally” (PW)
‘Surface, translucency, light and space are all as one; they are indivisible. … a pure idea of the physicality and illusion of the painting.” (PW)
On the wall, in the gallery, “ the subject of the painting has ceased to be the walkway or the trees but was instead the painting’s own mediation of these things.” (PW)
What I write here makes sense when we are in front of the painting, the 87 x 60 inches of a window whose semitransparent curtain filters the outside scenery and remakes it intensified on the floor. My brain, at first, was seeing nuances of gray as the dominant colors. My eyes were mimicking the curtain, tricky as they are. I stayed still for a while, waiting: and colors come to me.
As if the painting was waking from sleep. It was such a wonderful sensation that I liked to believe it was true for a second, a magical mutation. The one who was asleep was my brain, slowly making the colors out of the waves of light hitting the receptors at the door of my eyes. I am old, no surprise. You wrote it at page 94, dear artist, “Self-irony, or knowingness, is always present as part of nostalgia, even when we are tempted to think it is not.”
The viewer needs it as much as you. I continue to see the light blue and the pink in the sky that gives to the painting a vaguely luminous area taking off from the top of the trees, as if the end of foliage was a landscape line. The profile of earthly creatures. I want to be a bird in that sky.
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