To judge the entire essence of Giorgio Vicentini’s research through its pathways, it can be seen as being a permutating game that observes the surface of painting from every angle, subjecting the body of colour to different vibrations within the space.
With the passion of someone who organises his vision for uninterrupted working cycles, the artist is convinced of the unmatchable modernity of painting, an unpredictable field that holds within the visible threads of the project and the invisible depths of what needs to be done, an ancient issue regarding the practical-theoretical identity of art.
The directions of the colour correspond to the expansive energy of thought that follows the inner heights and glances from outside, loosening the grip on shapes among continuous sightings, veils of light and inescapable darkness.
During the course of decades lived with unmistakable restlessness, Vicentini followed the development of images with the desire to travel elsewhere, nudged by the impulse to fantasise around the “mother house” of colour. Nothing blocked the possibility of inventing metaphors and abstractions to tell stories connected to the metamorphosis of space, brushing against the infinity of romance or the atmosphere of primordial landscapes. Vicentini relentlessly budges the perceived perimeters and measurements, he imagines displacing defined locations, squares and homes with broken outlooks, signs dispersed in many ways, colours flashing among vapours. By overcoming the obstacles of ‘doing’, the artist constructs screens to protect the air of memories past, collecting wind within shapes, designing papers to fasten instants that the marking scratches, impulsive and mutable.
There are no limits to the perpetual motion of painting, the conjunctions between images are subtle and boundless, the outlines flexible, the details fleeting, with which the painter investigates the distant otherness of the landscape, hidden locations and surfacing places, promised lands and magical horizons.
As well as the fleeting definition of the perimeters, the environmental collocation of the surfaces is important, the calibrated succession of oblique shapes, the sliding and slightly raised perimeters, plastic variations that animate the scene of every installation, the polyphonic sequence of every chromatic hue.
For Vicentini, the search for the absolute – a controversial ambition of lyrical and abstract painting – is never connected to the myth of the sublime, but is rather nourished by the restless substance of the pigments, the rarefied moods of the unconscious, and the alternate paths of the mind. In harmony with the ebb and flow of life, the artist is hungry to explore the daily breath of things, vague areas made of air and water, liquid consistencies of earth, concrete puddles and abstract mud, shapes imbued with a profusion of lifeblood.
At the end of his poetic visions the active memory of the past can be found, the purity of venial sins, the amnesia and emptiness of thought, the grave errors and the scents of childhood, visions that subvert the certainty of language, attempting to unveil new dawns. The emotional climax of painting is in the physical strength of shapes, the passage from acute markings to soft counterpoints of colour, the circular enigma of things.
After all, Vicentini knows that there is always something inexplicable within the relationship between what painting reveals and what remains hidden, unfinished, unsaid, indeed the truest image is that which remains suspended like a castle in the air, a soft architecture of balanced markings over the abyss of knowledge.
When faced with the ambivalent reasons, there are no possible solutions or guarantees, therefore it is best to construct new dreams to survive the homogenisation of meaning. Hence, the artist increasingly resembles the figure of the tightrope walker, who takes risks over apparitions, keeps his balance between opposing ends, between wavy surfaces and flying trajectories, wooden supports and modulated metals, metal sheets, steels, plastics, plant-based cardboard.
Cosmic visions and interior geographies radiate through sparks of vitality, ungraspable energies that disperse from the surface of the environment, following perspective cuts and dilations of the preliminary space.
Painting and sculpture communicate between surfaces and depths, rounded volumes and solid contours, tactile materials and virtual horizons, without ever excluding reciprocal encroachments, dispersions, allusions to other imaginary thresholds.
In the “pure colour” cycle the image strengthens the fire of the light through two overlapping “polifoils”, a homage to the transparency with which the pigment is moulded with slight pressure on film, dense fluidity of colour that invents paths created with the requirements of the case at play.
These sheets of pure colour are pages of an unfinished book, a poem that – for the epic poet of fleeting longevity that is Vicentini – can be considered a homage to the eternal vision of the passage of time, the celebration of the temporary flow of ideas embodied in painting.
The maximum scale of extension is represented by a great banner that waves sumptuously in the emptiness, a collective communicative signal through the subjective pulsation of colour. On the other hand, this expansive sensation is enclosed in the archaic image of an artificial stilt house, an imaginary home of a man in conflict with nature and technology, a spatial module where Perspex columns and polifoil surfaces float in the emptiness between gusts of light and the contrasts of shadows.
Certain forays into the sacred lead Vicentini to interpret the iconic cross in plastic form, without religious references, an innate symbol of spiritual transformation that branches out to the boundaries of being. “Sweet martyr of painting”, this is how the painter likes to describe the continuous torment of searching for colour beyond himself, imagining instants of liberty that no method can foresee, apparitions of worlds irreducible to the pure mechanisms of style. In this sense, there’s no pretence to think of the path toward pictorial thinking, each action concentrates on the breath of colour and the magnetism between disseminated spaces, far but not estranged from the abstractions with which painting expresses its irreversible event.
In the recent cycle of “raw colour”, the act of removing is necessary to give meaning to emptiness, to bind truth to chromatic essence, to unabashedly show the raw lightness of painted film, the iridescence of shapes that transform into the eternal, projecting beyond those perimeters that Vicentini overcomes each and every time he needs to define them.