In one of the most famous images of Romanticism, the poet John Keats says that his name is written on water. The work of Nicola Rotiroti seems to be the nemesis of this concept, making the writing of the name imperishable, using the signature with flesh, more precisely a mixture of flesh and image, a hybrid. In cultural dimensions different from ours, in the East, the image/water/flesh mix is much more common. In that world, there is no difference between reality and evanescence, because the factor of time is irrelevant: whether reality is constituted in transient phenomena or definitive facts makes little difference. The sense of the expenditure of time assumes a faint happening, which is primarily a balanced reception of the event, aimed at a deeper understanding of profound laws. Water condenses and becomes flesh, or rarefies and becomes image, simply. The West, on the other hand, had to wait for Impressionism to decree the importance of “surface” states of consciousness, independent of will, and to equate them with seemingly definitive ones. All this predisposes us to a different understanding of pictorial happening in these works, where a liquid expressionism dictates new rules.

Returning to another image of Romanticism, I recall the “sinking” that is “sweet” in Leopardi’s words. In Nicola Rotiroti’s works, it is as if Ophelia had also become soluble, with a feeling of death that spreads through the liquid and becomes cosmic. The gentle and dramatic deformation occurring in these images becomes pure anguish when it takes the form of a return to the amniotic. These works seem painted from the horizon below, as if everything beneath the navel of the world gained importance for the first time, and our vision was overturned. What lies beneath the water’s surface, this liquid negativity, here takes precedence over what is above, and the world, according to a relativity that can only be anguishing, is inverted. This is also the movement of the psyche, in which a reversal is normally needed for the repressed to reach consciousness. This work is essentially the painter’s task, pursued by Rotiroti with a liquid allure that cannot fail to captivate us.