I’ve been listening to music since I was a child, I’m not in any way a technician of the subject, my listenings are purely dictated by instinct and sensitivity. Certainly my way of discovering music, compared to the past, has changed considerably, I belong to that generation that grew up with vinyl, who discovered new musical things through radio, magazines and random purchases. I’m talking about the 70s and 80s mostly and part of the 90s. Since my desire to […]
Andy Warhol, Brillo Box (Soap Pads). 1964, MoMA It has happened to me several times, and it will certainly have happened to you too, to run into someone to whom, asking him what work he does, with discouraging naivety, you heard “the artist” answer. Whenever this happens, as far as I am concerned, I feel deep embarrassment and pain for them and an overwhelming desire to run away from them. A self-declaration is therefore sufficient to give role and […]
Giovan Battista Zelotti, Allegory of Libra (particolre), Villa Emo in Fanzolo, dressing room of the grotesques, c. 1565. When the dungeons (caves) of Nero’s Domus Aurea were found in Rome around 1480, the effect on the painters of the time, and Raphael in particular, was a harbinger of unstoppable changes for the future visual alphabet. Those caves had, in fact, wall decorations which combined arboreal and floral elements with animal or human presences, often giving rise to beings of […]
Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Les hasards heureux de l’escarpolette (detail), 1767-68, Wallace Collection, London, photo Alonso de Mendoza The provenance of an author’s language, from a previous tradition, is therefore part of the dynamics of normalization (a process whereby an innovative or exceptional phenomenon, over several decades, spreads in the popular imagination), although it does not deprive it of the research content that instead continues. He takes up a discourse that comes to him from afar. He discovers that he is […]
Edward Munch, Puberty (detail), 1894-95, Oslo National Gallery The works of Edward Munch (1863-1944) have fascinated me more and more over the years. In Puberty of 1894-95, certain formal and perspective distortions typical of his mature language, to which this painting belongs, are not present. This work has a more intimate or apparently less explosive character than his other more violent and strident works, both in terms of colour and formal forcing. The explosiveness of this painting resides in […]
Caspar David Friedrich, Der Mönch am Meer, 1808-09 If the composition concerns the course of an image (horizontal, vertical, diagonal ascending / descending), the framing determines the point of view that the author has assigned to the viewer’s gaze, demonstrating that the image is designed specifically for him, for his involvement. The choice of the framing is therefore essential for the conveyance of the message, being able to place the viewer in a dominant or inferior position, protagonist or […]
Illustration by Daniel Haskett (detail) We have already observed how colour can create spatial artificialities (https://www.danilosantinelli.it/danilos-blog/spatial-use-of-colour/), but this process of showing something that does not exist in fact, is a practice usually used by authors of images, who through our experience of reality put us in a position of co-authors, or rather, assign us the task of completing the visual text. This aspect will certainly be clearer with the help of some examples. Looking at this image of Asterix, […]
Muntaka Chasant, Burning sheathed cables to recover copper at the Agbogbloshie e-waste landfill near the center of Accra, Ghana’s capital city (detail) After this long summer break I would like to resume from the central theme of this blog. That is, from that discourse already undertaken around the images and the impact they have on the constitution of our imagery and, therefore, of our experience, determining many of our points of view and the “form” of our thinking itself. […]
Danilo Santinelli, Bathers (detail), 1996 In this speech I would like to address the embarrassing problem that grips an entire generation, mine, and that I believe to be affected by a disarming smallness. A smallness expressed above all in the absence and therefore in reality not expressed, even if concrete and existential, which manifests itself in a failure to take a position on every aspect of civil and moral life. A generation that has not arrived, that neither declares nor […]
Leonardo da Vinci, St. Anne, the Virgin and Child with the Lamb (detail), 1510-13ca Colour has its own qualities of representation of space not connected to figuration. This is an aspect that Itten himself (Johannes Itten 1888-1967) debated in his essay Art of Colour (1961), but which we would like to exemplify here through the work (1) of an artist, also a lecturer at the Bauhaus like Itten, who deals with the spatial capacities of colour throughout his life. […]
