The exhibition of Maestro Attilio Forgioli was inaugurated yesterday, presenting an important selection of recent works on paper with the oil chalk technique.
The exhibition, Figures stretched, at the edge of the world was presented by Claudio Cerritelli.
Figures lying on the edge of the world
Observed countless times by Attilio Forgioli are the recumbent figures, the reclining bodies, the silhouettes lying on the ground, abandoned at the edge of the world, imaginal forms that emerge from the appearances of everyday life.
These are real media for ghostly visions, chromatic sediments and tangles of enveloping lines, sometimes inextricable, in many cases rapacious and gestural, or stratified like heaps of shadow waiting for new light.
Behind the semblance of these silent icons there is a sense of profound meditation on the human condition. Forgioli observes the situations of discomfort in urban life, in this sense he brings to light the fragility of the marginalized and helpless man in the face of general indifference.
The figures lying on the ground do not have a decipherable identity, Attilio met them on the sidewalks below the house, in the places available during the hours not intended for trade, with that sense of temporary welcome that the city grants, from evening to morning, not without signs of intolerance.
The artist recreates the stillness of the bodies enclosed within themselves, the atmosphere that transfigures their anonymous irrelevance, traces of a dispersed existence, with apprehensive moods, filtered through the truth of painting.
For Forgioli, painting is never a rational fact, the identity of the figural nuclei draws energy from their own enveloping, the extended and inanimate forms are regenerated in the joint event of sign and color.
The becoming body of the image is the space where the writing of the visible is praised, this has happened for landscapes, portraits, still lifes, objects and places of affection, indispensable means for letting what emerges from the daily observation of reality.
In these recent pastels Forgioli renews his relationship with the restless dimension of the present, in this sense he verifies his unmistakable way of looking at the world through the enchantment of painting, in the slow unfolding of its duration. As always, the luminous values are based on the structuring use of gray, according to which black is treated in a diluted and expansive way to obtain changing transparencies and intermediate tones.
It is a black that contains cobalt blue, or mixed with ocher establishes a changing relationship with the space through different shades of light. Signs and colors gravitate around the obsession of the figures lying on the ground, solitary apparitions suspended in the light of the void, the enveloping speed of the lines in relation to the density of matter.
The painting lives on fleeting atmospheres, violet reflections, green beats, light blue puffs, impalpable sensations of pink, minimal vibrations of yellow, intermittence of light and thicknesses of shadow, through uncertain and disrupted contours, cold tones that alternate with rapid ignitions.
In the crouched figures, unfathomable darkness and sudden flashes lurk, imaginative essences assimilated during the experiments of matter, different nourishment that painting draws from the memory of experience.
The point of view is usually linked to the horizon line of the reclining figures, however Forgioli also moves his gaze diagonally, distributing the weight of the masses with transverse gestures to lighten the fixity of the image and dilate the vision beyond the circumscribed measure of the forms.
Some figures are seen from above, flattened but not flattened, with minimal color pressures that only hint at the contours of the image, in other sheets vertical trends prevail that contrast with the usual posture of the recumbent figures. It is a compositional freedom that sometimes doubles the structural tension of the shots by playing above and below the dividing line of the ground.
On the other hand, the image is poised between figure and background, with variable shifts and mismatches, but also calibrated sequences of weights and counterweights that surprise the reader’s expectations.
The sources of inspiration are linked to the mutations of the body, the shape can be turned on itself from head to toe, on the back or above the bent elbow, sometimes it seems bound by insistent lines or protected by a blanket of color, in other cases the form seems on the point of disintegrating, to the point of dispersing the sign and chromatic essences on the indeterminate threshold of the indistinct.
A sense of mystery accompanies the figures in their silent appearance, it is never possible to distinctly discern the grimace of the mouth or the crease of the nose, the weight of the absent gaze, or the half-closed eyes, the slightest blinks inside the eyelids and what another subtle symptom of life.
Moreover, this allusive tension is typical of Forgioli, capable of avoiding too explicit descriptions by joining the almost shapeless dimension of color to the fervor of signs that shakes the absorbed figures and constantly regenerates them.
With veiled tones of melancholy Forgioli invents his conversation with strangers, anonymous people who have entered the heart of his painting, figures drawn and painted with that incurable desire to transform their precarious presence into visions of painful humanity, truthful images that continue to solicit the imaginative fantasies of his art.
Duration of the exhibition: from 18 October to 11 November.
Opening hours: Tuesday to Friday, from 17.00 to 19.00.
