After a journey the return, even if a return which does not geared towards a geographic location but an inner condition, an existential perception. That is what a viewer understands while exposing to the latest artworks by Romeo Candido. The risk however is to start talking about a primary feeling like the emotionality, missing the unspeakable those artworks can make experiencing to an audience. Something prior which, depriving it of any cultural and symbolic superstructure, I might try to call original or, better, a fulfilling primal. So that the mantle comes alive and becomes a holder of a creative progressing consciousness, changing what at the same time preserves, protects and generates. What retains the shapes are minimal actions, sufficient connection, like the pins lines. Just as in the artworks with the conifers leaves that are nothing else than needles, which fall, one after another, creating a pall of silence which holds a powerful life ready to take any form. Leaves of conifers as needles and such as eyelashes as well that rise and fall, opening and closing its sight upon the world. The eyelashes are the thick of an archetypal vegetation in a reduced scale of its fractal, an alluded anemone , a profile of a palm tree or a grass plate: the paintings become almost hushed, mixed with light. While in this way of acting in the artworks, almost discreetly, making fundamental those key facts which might seem minimal, the artist manages to achieve an unexpected result on who is exposed to the image. The reference to the contraction and expansion is inevitable, because it can evoke something of the dimension of man, the planetary and cosmic dimension as well. An artwork yet deals with archetypal forms, where a pall of black neoprene remains suspended on the wall fixed by two mulberries wooden sticks, not visible, but give it a reminiscent shape of a house. On that surface, which has a high capacity of sight absorption, almost minimal element of a black hole, rest two forms made by protective packaging material, held in place by pins. Anyone who act to this work as a contemporary art viewer, having the experience of those materials and maps them to the function (the neoprene is often used to protect, as well as forms used to prevent damaged items), the effect of first impression is messed, that one without coding, mediated by a sense which is not influenced by function or sign. The shell becomes a mask, the skeleton of a reality that exists in reality, the fair of a spirit that is the same body of protection and threat, with its mouth wide open in silent scream. In one of these masks a green liquid, however, brings a appeasement and the threat becomes almost a new confirmation of the return to a common ground, in the liquid, which is the most intimate form of protection, if you think of the amniotic fluid, or the world in the world, if you think of the sea, because
through the light it keeps the transparency generating new forms of many colors by its very nature. A shadow that is a plot that comes out of its own limit expanding on things. The expansion moves on until losing the edge, this could be another aspect that unites this artwork with the last of the first four I mentioned before. The latest work consists of rectangular pieces of burnt wood, mounted on the wall to get a shape that reminds once again the home, a house, however that expands its center, a blue screen, the very heart of the house, that space where everything can be done and become a volume that is less than 0, a volume is used to call virtual but real, huge and omnipotent. The journey and the return are now together, in a way of dealing with the reality that departs from the reasoning and any other cultural form, the primitive state where everything is about to happen and it is already happened, in the monitor on.
Silvano Rutigliano