CRITICAL NOTES by Luciano Caprile

Life can be narrated through the material that is manipulated, that is recovered so that nothing is left to chance, or in order to force chance to become a story, a story of gestures that do not know the future but anticipate it by leaving traces, retrieving the past to make it part of the present.

Thus Guido Profumo continues and expands an artistic research fuelled by inner scrutiny, while his hands are engaged in reactivating the meaning of a creative project developed by a vortex that turns around a nucleus and seems intent on squeezing the meaning of existence out of negligible things, remnants, from a living experience that unites us and, in this way, returns to play the role of protagonist.

Protagonism referred to transformation: thus the discarded element becomes a pretext and a clue to a future that is to be deciphered, step by step, revelation after revelation. This appears to be the deepest meaning of life that is renewed by grinding itself.

Heraclitus’ “panta rhei” (or ‘all flows’) may thus be re-proposed here as ‘all is transformed’.

Profumo, therefore, focuses on recovering things that surround him and in varying degrees relate to him, and it does not matter if they have also been used by others because the form of expression he has adopted (i.e. that which enables him to transform these things into essential elements of a perpetually evolving story) translates into an immediate act of possession and identification.

The rotating movement that squeezes and grinds his expressive intentions emerges from the wooden base that seems to absorb and thus reject the sense of a practice that portrays the image of inner torment and expressive desire which are destined to transcend the material itself.

His works are walls which exude a sense of physical and mental passage. As a result, the colours that characterise the image become the temporary relief of a wound or the wound itself, proposed as an ostensory element.

In his work, Profumo speaks of “subtraction” as an extreme attempt at learning through the obsession of a synthesis which, however, proposes continual, repeatable questions. This is the same, in fact, as we find in Antoni Tàpies’ tormented ‘walls’ or Alberto Burri’s disturbing ‘sacks’ hurling into an abyss of existential questions.

For his choice of expression, however, the artist pays a price, sharing the same fate as all those who refuse to limit themselves to merely contemplating the compositional result, preferring to focus on the substance of such a choice. To lose oneself for the purpose of finding oneself again seems to be the common destiny.

Moreover, a sense of elementary narration cannot be deduced by simply following the trail of sawdust that creates emerging tactile flowerings on the surface of the work, or the rivulets of colour which may perhaps trace a debatable idea of ​​escape.

Neither do the modulated pictorial rhythms provide easy opportunities for salvation.

Contemplation, as we have said, is not needed, or perhaps it would be more correct to say that contemplation serves only as an illusionary moment of consolation.

This may be enough for those who are willing to make do, but it is not enough for Profumo, to perceptively seeks out what people do not want to see, what they tend to disregard or eliminate due to a sense of discomfort, because the memory of what is rejected resembles too closely an accusation, perhaps against oneself.

Profumo’s wheel, therefore, grinds things and time by renewing the torment of everyday life and re-proposing the widened, incommensurable margin of the expectation of what is to come. Thus the “breaking out of the traditional mould” that the artist refers to itself becomes a proposal or a promise regarding the future of the laborious path of the panels.

This is a future that rests on metamorphosis and, therefore, is gradually perceived and anticipated as it unfolds, measuring steps and actions along the traces left by the consumption and regeneration of the elements that are ours and shall remain so even after their abandonment.

Paraphrasing Luigi Pirandello, therefore, we might say, “such is life, even if you do not think so”.

Luciano Caprile