EPILOGUE AND/OR PROLOGUE
Spring 2023 Menorca – “imagine” work just completed
I will speak, and this time I have chosen to write and communicate in the first person.
First, though, I would like to recall some words written about me in the past by friends that may, perhaps, make it easier to understand and justify my latest change of direction.
My friend Federico: “Many lives lived with intensity, passion, devotion, and without too much attachment to what he has become”.
My friend Maurizio: “I am familiar with a maxim that Guido is fond of, a sort of symbolic compass guiding his professional decisions, but also applicable to the inevitable twists and turns of life, a maxim that he has always shared with those with whom he is close: ‘if you keep doing what you have always done, you will end up where you have already been’. The maxim of a free and restless spirit”… “There is an adjective I believe successfully pinpoints the common thread in Guido’s work; it has remote origins, as though from ancient Rome. The Romans repaired marble statues using wax to cover up the defects, the cracks, the chinks. And so Sine Cera was the equivalent of a product created without ruse or deception, and therefore honest”.
My friend Anna Maria: “There is, ultimately, a sort of ancestral self-sufficiency in the works of Guido Profumo, like when one sets off on an expedition. They feature the essential. They feature what is useful, what we find in nature, within us, recovering and recycling internal and external elements, with practical reason and with respect to their essence (as in ‘Naturale, minimale sobrio’): there is always an act of decision, prior to setting sail”.
My friend Pino: “In Menorca I ‘glimpsed’ his mode of making art, in a tireless, almost relentless fashion”.
It has been months since I have felt that frenetic impulse to pour emotions onto the canvas…
Over the past few months, this impulse to paint that had ploughed and sowed me to the point of wanting to discover all aspects of the world in great detail, giving my all to works, catalogues, exhibitions, communication and engagement, has waned.
I am aware that if the impulse to produce and communicate has lessened, it seems consistent to experience my mode of making art more intimately.
A consistent approach that, in fact, if I consider myself from the outside, I was already embracing in my work, by way of a journey I declared was intended to free me of superfluity and excess, a journey of subtraction, towards the ESSENTIAL…
I am now directing this journey towards Nature, and what enthuses me about Nature…
Culture, values, and Art have been, are, and will be, the cornerstones of my life journey, inspiring my every choice.
I am convinced that no friend or acquaintance will be disappointed by this latest change in direction… an updating of the passions that have always defined my life choices: “Sine Cera”.
“So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future”.
(From the letter by McCandless to his friend Ronald Franz)
Indeed! I now think and feel that my “making Art” must not run the risk of becoming an involuntary expression of security, conformity, and conservatism.
Restless as I am, I no longer seek peace of mind… I embark on this extraordinary adventure that life can offer on condition that we live with sincere passion and enthusiasm.
My thanks to everyone who, over the years, has appreciated my artistic endeavours, and who I hope will continue to appreciate them in this new phase.