Solo exhibition with an unpublished presentation by Paolo Aita

Oreste Casalini has always confronted the tremendous. Instead of seeking aesthetic signs that correspond to a form, his works are bound by the fidelity to representing the climax. With each new exhibition, he seems to raise the stakes of emotional involvement. In this new small/large show, he explores the possibilities of installation, of fertilizing a space where we are invited to enter as into an arena of forces finally finding full expression.
Materials are used in unusual ways: open yet solid forms for wall works, based on an idea of painting that seeks to include the dimension of sculpture, and closed but ethereal forms in sculptural pieces, where three-dimensionality tends to collapse into the purity of a line.
Beauty is a rule that incorporates humankind, thus both composition and representation of reason and excess together. Hence the title ‘Aritmie’, alluding to a disturbance of formal regularity, to the fertile alteration of rhythm that opens unpredictable possibilities.
These works exist in the total absence of aesthetic hesitation, free from filters of taste or decorum, and from conventions dictating what is ‘proper’ to include in art, thereby encompassing far more than they should.
‘Solid painting’ here means a mode of containing chaos, an idea of immanence not represented but fully lived, carrying a renewed possible realism. The artwork thus becomes the result of an artistic practice turned into gesture—an immediate action from which matter emerges like lava flowing from an inner eruption. The space of the work is a boundary, a dam against dispersion and disorder; the paintings, true to their etymology, become ‘frames’, finite surfaces containing the infinite. Not merely signs, but body and substance—organic and spiritual materials tracing a horizon where pure perception becomes possible, representing a longing for the absolute that absorbs and erases all intellectual speculation, invading the entire canvas and transforming it into a solid form akin to sculpture. Here, matter becomes rhythm; images rise from nothing, station after station, solidifying new scenes with every gaze. The contending forces grow clearer, the structure of the painting more evident, until all dissolves again into white—the pure modulation of light and shadow—where images appear and vanish with the hours, colored by atmosphere, without boundary between inside and outside, emerging as pure traces of the secret energy binding all things together.
Before this vision lie black and white figures—intermediate beings suspended between human and divine—forms of an ideal inevitably faceless, without representation. Every beauty implies a pain where it is absent. In this lies all Western theory of the impossible creation of the body as representation of beauty. These bodies embody it, yet none can say whether they are beautiful because of their ideal nature or because of their composition. They are beautiful because they make every question about beauty possible.
‘Aritmie’ is therefore an angelic metaphor, cloaking with qualities and features that which cannot be said. For this reason, Oreste Casalini can project anything onto these works or let them say anything—just as the lover projects love onto the beloved, and likewise occurs the incarnation of the spiritual: in all cases, the body is never seen in its specificity. It is only imaginable, invisible because uninflectable—convulsive because that body is us.