CRITICAL NOTES of Luciano Caprile

IN SEARCH OF THE ESSENTIAL

The last two works by Guido Profumo, which spring from a present-day view of life smitten by a virus, accentuate the sense of a constant search for oneself through the consumption of the world. Obligatory confinement forces people to stop time and measure it by observing themselves in the mirror. And to measure themselves with an unexpected, unfamiliar awareness. How much space is given to the absence of ourselves and the torments of consciousness outside the frenzy of everyday life! What a debt to suffering! While The Edge is a large painting on jute characterized by a black grate that seems to have the role of cancelling its rarefied expressive content, Frammenti da ricomporre [Fragments to be Recomposed] displays, floating on the air, the fragments of a lost certainty or expresses the foundations of an order that the world is accustomed to calculating on the basis of convenience. The pale blue circle that seals the scene is a single, fleeting reference to the ceaseless pursuit of that truth that reflects a craved and unattainable perfection. In this sense, these two works are related to the three that precede them chronologically and are as yet untouched, from an emotional point of view, by the current crisis situation. And yet, in a gradual subtraction of shapes and shades, they dig into the author’s unconscious and portend its fears and evasions, having as their constant point of reference the focal mark characterized by an essential black circle (One) or a bright igniting globe (Two) or several circles attracted by a blue material centre (Three). In all these works, however, there emerges once again a desire to find existential truth beyond the form, beyond the ornament. The artist does not follow a narrative process but a path of investigation, which foretells the extreme defleshing of himself as if each subtraction (just like an oxymoron) corresponded to the addition of precious elements of knowledge. An atmosphere distilled in black and white is broken suddenly with a piercing flash of red, like an open wound marking the sense of a tragedy, to emphasize how everyday life can affect the process of creation. This occurs in One, where the black circle now takes on the meaning of a sorrowful event. Profumo painted this work after the death of his beloved brother Massimo, and the wave that ignites the scene is its consequence, and sets the tone. For a moment the path of purification stops on the edge of the abyss, in front of this sad reality. Two also appears to spring from the same state of mind which, like a dying sun, bleeds the blatant marks of torment, of pain in search of comfort. Three, on the other hand, appears to be seeking to drench and soften the pain in the blue of the sea that his brother loved and frequented so much, with the help of painted or applied threads that descend from above to plunge into the depths of nostalgia. Here the approach is to flaunt that which has been taken away from us and which appears as a relic, like a scattering of stigmata. There seems to be no other way to consolation but to seek it gesture after gesture, without knowing when it will end. The end is in the white that sinks beyond the outer limit of the canvas (a limit that is not real but conceptual), which brings to the fore fragments of life in perpetual movement, on which these circles rise in the role of dreamed perfection or hermetic markings to stamp and seal the stages of risk or a moment of necessary reflection on oneself and on the journey undertaken or to be continued in inquiry, avoiding not only the sirens of complacency but also the sinister trap of perdition. Now and again, thin, sharp lines appear from the centre of the circle as if to trace the rigorous geometry of a path or build a germinal point of reference (from this point, from this centre the story begins again). These are continuous lines, which annul the limits of the painting as if to show a way beyond all concreteness, all purpose, and all hope. Thus this journey of his includes no set destinations, only transits, pauses and memories to be sown along the way. For Profumo all this translates as both a condemnation and a privilege: being forced to assess oneself inwardly in order to measure one’s desire for greater knowledge of oneself and the world means placing every event in the furrow of a path that adds mystery to mystery and provides no certainty, because certainty is identified with the goal that must never to be reached; it represents, in fact, the end that our artist must not and does not want to know if he is to avoid losing the enchantment that he has built for himself as a cultural reason for living. On the other hand, as Jorge Luis Borges said, “everything happens for the first time, but in a way that is eternal”. Thus the artist’s actions, at the moment they are completed, become part of a universal fabric that is not ours to know.

Luciano Caprile