PROCESS OF UNDERSTANDING by Luciano Caprile

A gesture contaminates the blank page or the still-intact canvas, anticipating the thought and provoking surprise or amazement in the person who took that first step, so revealing of the self and the subconscious. Full awareness will come later, and will have the task of modulating tones and forms before subsequent gestures intervene to reformulate the initial concept and to renew an accord of timbres and substances, or underline their irremediable torment. There follows an alternate sequence of realizations and rebellions, as though the hand and the mind had entered into fierce competition; this is precisely because what appears suddenly on the surface does not always appease or gratify that logic or that decorum which screens our intentions, purifying them, controlling their excesses. This happens in art which digs into life and offers contemporary society the juice it is entitled to. It happens to art which sets out to represent not the pleasant superficiality or harmony of the aestheticizing consumption which envelops us and penetrates us in everyday life, but which questions the sometimes traumatic essence of life as we are currently experiencing it.
There are plenty of obvious examples in the history of twentieth century art, from Jackson Pollock who obsessively busied himself with dripping, to Jean Fautrier, absorbed by his disturbing “otages” [“hostages”]; from Georges Mathieu, excited by the coram populo performances, to the incisive Emilio Scanavino with his “sindoni” [“shrouds”] to name a few examples. In all of these, who practised an informal approach, the “image” was the immediate result of an emotion which they managed to convey to those careful observers who, upon coming into contact with these works, were capable of extracting the deepest meaning or the sometimes traumatic impulse of a time which feeds us perpetually.

“Tracce e segni di questo tempo” (“Traces and Signs of This Time”) is the title of a series of recent works that Guido Profumo presents in the present day, confirming the ongoing relevance of a compositional approach which does not contemplate behavioural allowances or structural expediencies. His method includes making a draft on a piece of paper, involving a certain logic of process, the graphical transfer of an intention. But when the flow of the medium comes into play, his behavioural decision is nourished by an immediate emotion, and the “image” acquires a form triggered by the rapid, instinctive gesture which justifies it. The “traces and signs of this time” become recurring wounds or insistent suggestions of the soul, to be urgently transferred onto the surface that receives them and spreads them out in circular movements, in accumulations of material, in hues that are sticky, squeezed, thrown on, etched, contaminated, scratched where necessary in order to accentuate, mould, renew questions, doubts and worries which in turn generate new questions, new doubts, new worries. And where the excess material returns, and is received into the great magma in which nothing is lost because everything is needed to tie back together the story, however slight, of the things that accompany, corrode and settle upon the days.
Profumo has chosen wood, rather than canvas, as the surface on which to intervene with bold determination, using acrylics, favouring a circular movement that allows him wide pathways, inner pathways of incision and stripping away, of removing materials and replacing them with another substance; he searches for a truth to implode, perhaps through coloured fragments to be released into the eddy of the vortex. We can see as much in the work which bears as a subtitle or annotation, “Traccia su chiaro” [“Trace on light”]. The “light” here is a wide white brushstroke which stretches to the top of the rotating structure, where it concedes part of itself. From the central focus of the event, a black trickle descends, the result of a squeeze or a jet which reaches the centre of the painting’s lower margin and would appear to surpass it, suggesting a non-conclusion, or rather a reference to the next work, the next station of gestural and contemplative labour. The rotating movement which absorbs and amalgamates the material is found in the light composition titled “Tracce su scuro” [“Traces on dark”]; on it, a leaden background blooms,
like a forewarning, like the upset of betrayed innocence.
The focal, radial jet of light is visually and psychologically polluted by the red rivulet trickling down from the wound, immediately perceived by the gaze as being similar to a regret, a betrayal of desires. This concept is partially echoed by “Tracce dall’alto” [“Traces from Above”], in which a broader approach gives the central nucleus that expansive movement, drawing into its field of action fragments of memory, salvaged scraps, additional flows of material. This establishes a sky of extreme visual clarity, which hosts a motley process of becoming, in time with the centrifugal movement, dispensing rhythms of sophisticated dissonance too, like attacks on that perfection which does not belong in our world. Similar observations, multiplied by the presence of additional spheres in the sky of the scene portrayed, might apply to “Tracce globali” [“Global Traces”]. When Profumo states that he wants to express through his works his personal mood, “which I hope will not leave viewers indifferent, but might arouse curiosity, emotions, empathy in them”, he takes on a perceptive and emotional responsibility for all those who will become aware of certain existential passages thanks to the finality and critical nature of his gesture; a gesture which goes far beyond the final result seen in the painting, but concerns the conceptual and formal labour which made it possible. More sensitive, attentive observers can reconstruct that labour by picking up on constitutive elements bearing similar importance in their own subconscious.
With “Segni su scuro” [“Signs on dark”] we see a partial change of scene, as though the trusty circular structure were capable of producing calligraphic elements, derived from ideograms, able to offer a different interpretation, firstly to the artist himself, who drew them by following the impulse of a gradual, gratifying surprise. Meanwhile in “Segni di cloud” [“Cloud signs”] the black vortex, its nucleus expanded by a return and an accumulation of scrap material salvaged and remixed by the artist, invades, sharpens and pulverizes the rusty space that holds it. The mystery which envelops and distils “Segno zero” [“Sign Zero”] in its hieratic spatial suspension reverberates in the concept of “Tracce radar” [“Radar Traces”], with its expansive echoes, renewable in the momentary construction of a totemic figure or in connecting a thought or emotion with the additional chapter in a story of images, which everyone can build for themselves, having understood the impulses which determined its justification. Indeed Profumo, like all artists who manage to convey evocative sensations to those who share the mood of their works, throws pebbles of worry into the large, still pond of the illusory standardization of life This brings us to “Tracce di luci” [“Traces of Light”]: this painting masks the intention of a prevarication, as a second canvas, built up with thick, alien matter, seems to barge its way into the atmosphere which received the previous circumstances, now relegated to a marginal position. The wounds of such an expressive cataclysm lead to squeezes of blood along crisis lines, and swift criss-crossing drips showing mental demarcation and the lack of a gratifying narrative substance. Yet another riddle to solve for those engaging, with their eyes and emotions, in this journey into the complex labyrinth of the soul. The gradual cognitive process then arrives at “Tracce in campo” [“Traces in the Field”], which consists of a large, repeated rotating movement of material spreading out from the central nucleus; at the margins of the composition it brings in other material full of germinations and evocations, in a tactile sense too. Finally, the desire of a planned sequence seems to descend upon this tormented expressive process, as though the artist felt the need to gather together and order the tangible fruits of his emotions. His narrative fury seems, indeed, to find a suitable response in “Segni multipli” [“Multiple signs”], which can be considered the progressive memory of projects laid out along the pale, soft, inviting, and allusive shell-like spiral. And from here, to reawaken the breath of contemplation, his own and others’, and direct it towards an increasing desire for understanding.