Secret Sign

Afro, Carla Accardi, Roberto Almagno, Franco Angeli, Tomaso Binga, Giacinto Cerone, Giuseppe Chiari, Pietro Finelli, Myriam Laplante, Mario Merz, Elisa Montessori, Marco Petrella, Piero Pizzi Cannella, Oliviero Rainaldi, Carmine Tornincasa

The idea, the concept of "drawing" dominated Italian culture for several centuries from the Renaissance onwards, becoming a school for the rest of the world.

The mastery of drawing has been the obsessive thought for many generations of artists, considering it the first foundation of art to be elevated to a universal principle. Drawing is often at the root of the creation of a work of art and was at a decisive moment in Italian Renaissance culture. Accredited by critics as the place where it is possible to observe the inspired side of creativity in a more evident way, it is easier to grasp the intuition, the momentum, the truth than in the works later realized. But often, and much more so in our contemporary times, drawing has been considered by many artists as a unique work, as a true creative expression to which nothing else needs to follow. In which the basic element of the sheet of paper, in its multiple expressions, exalts the material component.

In the exercise of art, drawing therefore exalts the artist's most secret individuality. It works with perceptible depth, the lines and colors find their vibrant strength in the candid sheet. And often the artist's technical expertise allows them to see beyond the line and probe beyond the material. A line that overturns reality, determines its spatial boundaries, shifts shadow and light, conceives color and its absence in a different way. His is both a vision and a physical intervention on paper. While to paint, the artist must somehow maintain a distance from the canvas and often move away to better verify the tension of the colors and the perspective of the image. Drawing, by its nature, requires a distance and at the same time a much closer and more constant focus of the gaze, almost assimilated to when writing, in a limited and fixed field of view to capture everything as a whole, even in complex and detailed drawings. This is why examining a sample of drawings almost always requires a different kind of attention on the part of the visitor than what a painting sample requires. 

This exhibition "on drawing" the first of several that will follow in the near future, stems from the desire to make the importance of this creative possibility better known to a wider audience through their unique and personal interpretation of their artistic research. But also to stimulate in this area a new form of collecting that has recently lost its luster but that is essential to know better and more intimately the artists closest to us in language and history.

Massimo Scaringella