It’s an invitation to come and visit me, to discover my hidden realm…
Globalization has swallowed up all that is private and all forms, as well as genres, seem the same, falsely identical. I ask for nothing spectacular, nothing public, nothing sociological, nothing sensational.
I look at a shelf and discover an object, I open a closet and see a jacket I don’t wear. I look for my shoes and “read” many different pairs.
It is a going backwards in time; I am isolated among my things wich sooner or later will disappear. I see things of yesterday, but with the eyes of today. A waistcoat, a shirt, unworn ties, an amphora, an archeological find, clogs, orthopedic shoes, blouses, smocks, bags, cofee-markers.
I turn on myself; it is the terror of being alone painting these objects. I understand my unspoken words, I understand my shame, I understand their silence intertwined with my solitude…
It is lonely, looking inside oneself, depriving oneself in ever-greater measure. Keys, locks, mannequins… but if I paint this jacket it is no longer yours… I steal the private part of you and so you cling to your trade, to memory, to affection.
In the preface to the previous cycle “Goodbye Roberta”, dedicated to my wife, Boatto wrote: “A man has lost his woman, his bride… In his loss, the man feels the painful fill of emptiness”.
That man is a painter, and he is no longer satisfied with estranging, alienating the thing, the object. In an almost painstaking fashion, in the style of Hogarth, he can no longer save himself with irony, even if he arranges bags in fabric and leather, green rubber hospital clogs, a barber’s brush, a coffee-maker which he must now, by himself, learn to use, at least to make himself a coffee.
He attempts symbolic paintings dedicated to those who were still to receive the impossible invitation. The entire cycle is entitled “At my Home” with the number 6 clearly visible, because this is the street number of the painter’s home.
They are sad paintings, charged with melancholy, where not even the desired private realm can be saved, because it has been infected by solitude, abandonment, and by an increasingly indifferent outside world, where no-one “blushes” any longer, where everyone prohibits someone from doing something. And to think we said it was “forbidden to forbid”… even in painting.
The paintings lie between representation and presentation, where extreme languages converge, and it is for this very reason that they mark the beginning of a climate of truth.
Perhaps they still risk over-dramatization, but their aim is to be a humble, painful diary, which still makes you exist to resist.
At least, the gaze of the painter it is not alien to the “objects” on the edge of the precipice, because it is the work that has eyes; it watches you, upsets you. These objects are perilous, ruins charged with memories of our own ruins, heavy with melancholy. It is not at all relaxing, meeting these objects. Enigmatically evocative, they evoke a threshold whose gaze is turned backwards, a simple, but also poignant nostalgia, because it is only now that we understand and love these things, already seen many times, but never possessed by the present.
A relationship is now possible, albeit with “blushing” and trembling due to its rigidity. These objects must be drawn-painted to be recognized and to allow new works like “At my Home” always to exist, also by the same painter who, now abandoned too, wants to cherish and equate with his own pain. These simple objects resound, producing an echo like an obsession, and now it is the object which is “master” of the painter. There is an intimate immensity which provides us with shelter, and so we attempt a slow maneuver to reach it… objects like empty shells, pretending at least to dust them off.
This plain-plane, while meticulous, could take in any intimate object, lovingly touched as it was in the past, but devastated that it no longer is. The plane becomes a desert of ferrous sand.
All of the objects are “outside”, they are in another scene, none are “inside”. None will be denied, but each will propose its own solitary denial… they are chastised objects, because they are abandoned.
Barman would say that these objects offer themselves as “slow”, and “accelerating” makes sense “only as a preparation for slowing down, which is the main aim. The quality of the acceleration, in final analysis, will be evaluated based on the relief of slowing down”.
Let us hope to go slowly, suturing wounds.
Concetto Pozzati