Pittura Metafisica

The discovery of my metaphysical world…

 All got under way in the house where I was born and had lived until my teen years. In here I had realized my first paintings just when the house was left behind. The silence and the emptiness of the house cleared out of the furniture reminded me of the amazing and secret experiences of my childhood, which led me to the discovery of their hidden meaning. Here follows a short description of the places from which I’ve drown on my strongest sensations:

 THE WALLED-UP GARDEN – It dealed with a sort of outdoor museum close to the Malatestian Cathedral, made up of the crocks of the bombing of an ancient franciscan Church on a side, while the rest was surrounded by old and high walls. We could enter only by climbing over the walls.

 Inside it, there were gathered marble ruins, gravestones, Roman capitals, columns and trunks of the sculptures half-hidden by the ivy and other climbers primping the surroundings.
 I still have strong memory of certain dreams I had when I was a child and set up in this place which filled of funny creatures such as mythological animals and silent statues trying to hide themselves from my look.

 THE OLD SEMINARY OF RIMINI – The rooms and the corridors of the old abandoned seminary were a fantastic place really attractive for all my feelings. I drived into a sort of timeless dimension, where objects and furniture triumphed in glory, as free from the ordinary for which they had been created. The lines, colours and the materials which they were composed, such as golden or varnished wood, the rare marbles, the giant candalabras, blackboards and the survey maps, sparkled throughout a play of lights and shadows, ray of sun filtered through the barks and the windows and amplified by the oxidized mirrors hang up the walls. In the same time we could catch a glimpse of old dusty statues in painted wood, like Angels, shepherds or the Wise Men accompanying my exciting adventures with dreamy glance.

 THE RUINS OF THE ROMAN AMPHITHEATRE – This place entirely isolated from the city, as it was hidden by a thick park full of trees, abstracted myself from the age I lived.
 I managed to rebuild the missing parts, with fantasy, through the pictures I saw on an old book in my house: the sculptures on the archs and the watercrafts (it was a naval amphitheatre) occupied by the gladiators. For certain points of view, it seemed a labyrinth.  From the narrow and long corridors made up of high walls and without roof, steep staircases getting on the betterments or coming down the underground, while all around there was a network of mill-run full of running water surrounding the boundary walls. The water, coming from a dungeon spring, flew slowly and quietly while salamanders, funny black amphibian beings moved amongst aquatic plants.
Close to the amphitheatre there was:

 THE OLD DISUSED RAILWAY – In a large waste of rusty rails half-hidden by weeds, the Old Steam Engines stayed proudly and motionless erected, still hooked up their conveys, made up of freight or passengers cars, like real shelters for children games. The wide rail park surrounded by the medieval walls on a side, and by the Amphitheatre on the other side, represented an incredible and unhoped place to the heart of a child who managed to move those trains by his own fantasy’s power, fed up by my first childhood’s memories when the railway was still working and where I could see those small and smoky conveys sliding away slowly from the boundaries of the garden of my grandmother’s house.

 Those and other similar places have been the sources of my first metaphysical impressions. These experiences and sensations were really like a bolt from the blue in that fateful springtime day in 1971, when for the first time in my life I was in front of a De Chirico’s painting. In his paintings’ parts and appearances I found all I had been seeing and feeling in all the course of my life. The discovery of his paintings was to me like seeing for the first time my soul’s invisible secrets decoded by images. In the course of my life I’ve been keeping on searching the hidden side of the reality with its places full of feelings such as those of my first years from which I took several inspirations described in some drawings and paintings I realized in a second time.
Amongst them I quote about one in particular, the most important one to me:

THE VERDI THEATRE IN FERRARA – Closed for 33 years indeed, that place I entered in some way revealed itself as a horrifying setting worthy of a Hitchcock’s play: big black birds flew in a circle, cawing inside the wide theatre’s hall, under the dome made up of broken glasses from which the birds went tinto, while, on the stage half-enlightened by an yellowish dusty and feeble light, we could catch a glimpse of furniture and objects piled up by chance and playing a sort f silent show as they were lively ghosts.

My incredible adventure has filled up my “feelings store”, my secret file from which I keep on drawing on my inspirations for giving life to new metaphysical works