[et_pb_section fb_built=”1″ _builder_version=”4.21.0″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”][et_pb_row admin_label=”Riga” _builder_version=”4.21.0″ _module_preset=”default” locked=”off” global_colors_info=”{}”][et_pb_column type=”4_4″ _builder_version=”4.21.0″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”][et_pb_divider show_divider=”off” _builder_version=”4.21.0″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”][\/et_pb_divider][\/et_pb_column][\/et_pb_row][et_pb_row _builder_version=”4.21.0″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”][et_pb_column type=”4_4″ _builder_version=”4.21.0″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”][et_pb_text _builder_version=”4.22.1″ _module_preset=”default” header_font=”Poppins||||||||” header_text_align=”left” header_font_size=”40px” locked=”off” global_colors_info=”{}”]<\/p>\n
[\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column][\/et_pb_row][et_pb_row _builder_version=”4.21.0″ _module_preset=”default” background_color=”#FFFFFF” sticky_position=”top” global_colors_info=”{}”][et_pb_column type=”4_4″ _builder_version=”4.21.0″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”][et_pb_text admin_label=”indice” _builder_version=”4.21.0″ _module_preset=”default” link_text_color=”#000000″ position_origin_f=”bottom_right” global_colors_info=”{}”]<\/p>\n
1958<\/a> – 1965<\/a> – 1968<\/a> – 1970<\/a> – 1973<\/a> – 1975<\/a> – 1977<\/a> – 1978<\/a> [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_divider color=”#000000″ _builder_version=”4.21.0″ _module_preset=”default” locked=”off” global_colors_info=”{}”][\/et_pb_divider][\/et_pb_column][\/et_pb_row][et_pb_row column_structure=”3_4,1_4″ _builder_version=”4.21.0″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”][et_pb_column type=”3_4″ _builder_version=”4.21.0″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”][et_pb_text admin_label=”1958″ module_id=”1958″ _builder_version=”4.21.0″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”]<\/p>\n \u2026 In Piattella there is an instinct, a genuine plastic and natural instinct that saves him from easy solutions. To be convinced of this, one need only look at his ink drawings, his notebooks, where the nature of his surroundings is studied in details and fragments: hedges, roots, waves and rock formations, botany and anatomy. During his university years, the young pharmacist must have had a genuine passion for Leonardo\u2019s notebooks. But let us not go so far. Let us keep an eye on this laconic and likeable young man, who knows how to shake hands with an old-fashioned, energetic vehemence.<\/p>\n Raffaele Carrieri<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u2026 The painting once again becomes a diary of things seen, albeit filtered through the screen of individual emotion. Where we do not find this direct inspiration, this correspondence with a local reality, with a chosen landscape, there may perhaps be reason for mistrust. Consider, as compelling examples, the poetic sincerity of Tap\u00eces, of a Chighine. A reactionary argument, perhaps, cutting the wings of too many flights into the realms of the esoteric and Byzantine obscurity. But Piattella is truly a painter who is at once spontaneous and highly refined. Intuitively, he has succeeded in combining the allusive force and candid pathos of the early Utrillo with the equally poignant irony of Dubuffet. He possesses a power of synthesis between composition and colour, between light and graphic invention, of a kind rarely encountered. His canvases vibrate with a sensibility composed of excitement and melancholy. One will notice explorations of language in various directions, always, however, along the path of a lyrical transposition of the natural image. These are stages in his solitary work, declared without artifice. And the drawings (that beautiful album of notes, so intense, genuine and immediate) confirm the judgement as to the sincerity of inspiration and the quality of stylistic invention of this new painter\u2026<\/p>\n Franco Russoli<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u2026 If Fautrier, of whom we have just finished speaking, stands at the origin, the paintings and inks by Oscar Piattella exhibited at the Ariete are one of its consequences: and the derivation can be understood if one bears in mind that the new painter, a pharmacist from Pesaro and self-taught in painting, is not yet thirty. But once this observation has been made, it is only right to state all the reasons that separate and distinguish him. As I have indicated many times, however, within young Italian painting it is possible to discern, within a non-figurative area, a strong aspiration to reopen a dialogue with the real world, with the seasons, with the emotions and adventures of landscape, for the moment within a space and with accents that are preferably intimate and lyrical. The painting, that is, as Franco Russoli says in presenting Piattella\u2019s first Milan exhibition, becomes once again a diary of things seen. Self-taught, says the catalogue: but there is no doubt that the painter is extremely well informed about everything taking place in Italian art in this direction\u2026<\/p>\n Marco Valsecchi<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text admin_label=”1965″ module_id=”1965″ _builder_version=”4.21.0″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”]<\/p>\n \u2026 In an area of profound quiet, where it is still possible to meditate with ease, he has turned his gaze towards the stars, which reveal their presence in a gleam of precise light or in a halo of mystery, amid the immensity of the night skies. Without provoking anguished shocks or delirious emotions, without seeking to astonish, he now offers us a contemplation of Leopardian measure, within an order that is at once intellectual and lyrical.<\/p>\n Luigi Dania<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text admin_label=”1968″ module_id=”1968″ _builder_version=”4.21.0″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”]<\/p>\n \u2026 His imagination does not underestimate a continuous body\/light relationship; nor does it deprive light of its concrete, natural foundation, of its dependence \u2014 as far as colour is concerned \u2014 on other elements. It is not directed, in short, towards the creation of some possible planetary mythology (Vasarely, for example), even through personal and different means, but rather towards the expression of an earthly mythology. Yet Piattella could not be understood without saying that, as he proceeds, he carries out, on these foundations, a logical operation capable of removing any suspicion of facile recourse to effects devoid of meaning. What matters to him is also to fix a depth, a form, a movement contained within a global image in which light is not, so to speak, abstracted from its sources, nor deprived of its lyrical force.<\/p>\n Roberto Sanesi<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text admin_label=”1970″ module_id=”1970″ _builder_version=”4.21.0″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”]<\/p>\n \u2026 Thus Piattella has his own thematic thread of evocative lyricism, unfolding around an emblematic figure which, in the most varied evocative forms, has been the axis of his painting for many years: the theme of the tree \u2014 or rather, as he himself tells me, \u201cnot only of the tree, but of the skies, the clouds, the sea, man, woman, origin\u201d. It is clear, then, that the tree is an extreme, primordial, all-encompassing term: the tree of life, and the Leopardian boundary facing infinity, a revealer of time, of the eternal rhythm of the seasons, of the transient rhythm of life, a cosmic and affective, even sentimental symbol. It is a presence that Piattella articulates over the years in the most diverse ways, from a vaguely imaginative evocativeness, in profiles or sections, to the more indirect transpositions of recent years into chromatic and luminous confetti (solo exhibition at galleria l\u2019Ariete in May \u201968), up to the very recent strips of sky, \u201cthese stratifications of skies, luminescent visions of landscape situations and, in a more intimate relationship, condensations of memory, memories that surface and disappear, slowly, or with timeless speed, magical premonitions of a superhuman dimension\u201d.<\/p>\n Enrico Crispolti<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u2026 Oscar Piattella\u2019s painting \u2014 at \u201cArtivisive\u201d \u2014 constitutes an example of an authenticity free from the constraints of trends and capable of absorbing cultural stimuli and the demands of human relationships with an autonomy of vision free from any pressing reference. His position seems, in a certain sense, to be \u201canthropocentric\u201d, in the sense of a personal modulation of inventions and modulations expressed through a chromatic tension which, while clearly abstract in tone, nevertheless always proceeds from a concentrated, personal visual responsibility.<\/p>\n Sandra Orienti<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u2026 The theme of this painting unfolds as the evolution of a very precise iconography, that of the tree, understood also and above all in an emblematic sense: the tree of life, a cycle completed from root to fruit, a rhythm renewed upon the hinges of life and death. The tree, with its crown expanding into a circle, becomes the geometrically perfect circle, symbol of infinity without alpha or omega. But apart from an investigation of content, certain relationships of colour are interesting for the extraordinary vibrations of light \u2014 and, I would say, even of sound \u2014 that they create. These orderly, meticulous spirals disappear towards the depths of an unlimited space, an unbridgeable abyss of motionless time\u2026<\/p>\n Maria Torrenti Foti<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u2026 After the Bernheimer exhibition, the week offers us another welcome surprise: Oscar Piattella\u2019s solo exhibition at Artivisive. Although he has already exhibited in distinguished galleries (twice at the Ariete in Milan and once at the Medusa in Rome), Piattella is still an almost unknown name: it is no coincidence that Crispolti, the enthusiastic presenter of this exhibition, speaks of a \u201cPiattella\u201d case. Secluded in a small town in the Pesaro area, the painter in fact works \u201cwithin his own dimension of space and time, which he has naturally chosen and above all preserved and cultivated as the very place in which his independence becomes possible\u201d. Piattella\u2019s large abstract paintings, with broad transverse zones or circles of velvety, pulsating colour, derive not so much from Morris Louis, Vasarely or Bill as from Rothko. But whereas in the American painter light is never naturalistic and is entirely mental, Piattella\u2019s always retains a connection with nature.<\/p>\n Lorenza Trucchi<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text admin_label=”1973″ module_id=”1973″ _builder_version=”4.21.0″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”]<\/p>\n \u2026 And so Piattella today confronts colour-light directly, without any symbolic mediation. The distillation of his painting, which has reached an almost extreme point of renouncing everything that is not directly essential, has led him to an abstraction laden with meaning. The elegy, the \u201ccondensation of memory\u201d of which Crispolti spoke, filled with resonances that are not naturalistic but \u201cnatural\u201d, is expressed through the minimum of means: colour as \u201clight\u201d, the painting as a \u201cfield\u201d of luminous energies, within which light is modulated and inflected in ways that are always the same and always different.<\/p>\n Cesare Vivaldi<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text admin_label=”1975″ module_id=”1975″ _builder_version=”4.21.0″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”]<\/p>\n \u2026 I only wish to add, in this testimony for a friend whom I esteem, that at times the art of today no longer analyses the relationship between the \u201cself\u201d and what lies \u201coutside the self\u201d, but, anti-historically, only one term of that relationship: hence, perhaps, the anguish, the gratuitousness of constructions based solely on intellect or solely on manual skill. Piattella restores the problem to its proper dimension, without ignoring the \u201craisons du coeur\u201d, but conducting his experience under the sign of awareness\u2026<\/p>\n Claudio Verna<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text admin_label=”1977″ module_id=”1977″ _builder_version=”4.21.0″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”]<\/p>\n \u2026 One should bear in mind the great cultural tradition according to which, to use the words of Giordano Bruno, \u201c\u2026 providence has ordained that (man) should be occupied in action by his hands, and in contemplation by his intellect; so that he does not contemplate without action and does not act without contemplation\u201d. It is the philosophical tradition according to which the whole is reflected in every smallest thing, so that the inner tension animating Oscar Piattella in his privateer\u2019s war \u2014 (a piratical war, but of loyalist stamp!) \u2014 is the same tension in which our civilisation is struggling at this moment in its history.<\/p>\n Giulio Angelucci<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text admin_label=”1978″ module_id=”1978″ _builder_version=”4.21.0″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”]<\/p>\n \u2026 The titles accompanying Oscar Piattella\u2019s exhibition are: Grande Narciso, Piccolo Narciso, Il Settebello, Dieci per un Nero, Acquarello Primo. The exhibition is an analysis of light seen as pictorial matter, conjugated across the surface of the canvas through various modulations. \u201cA work conceived solely in relation to light and its caress, without which it would not exist,\u201d Cesare Vivaldi writes in his preface, \u201cin the same way that the Braille alphabet is conceived for the caress of a blind person\u2019s hands.\u201d The work reveals colour\u2019s ability to capture the luminous element, and the capacity of the pictorial surface to transmit small refractions, subtle impulses of light. The exhibition moves within an analytical dialectic in which painting reflects upon its own status and grammars, and a synthetic one in which painting and seeing become functions of existence\u2026<\/p>\n Achille Bonito Oliva<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u2026 Light is always reabsorbed into itself: white upon white, black upon black, every painting by Piattella is a surface in which, to use Ungaretti\u2019s words, \u201call vain light was drunk\u201d. \u201cNatural\u201d light has disappeared, distorted into the absolute of snow or that of coal, yet it has left behind its essential terms (its references), the traces of its passage, of its coagulation within the fixed tracks of chromatic thicknesses, within the geometrical, rigorous, infinitely patient application of a pictorial matter laboriously worked, layer after layer, film after film: a coagulation of different luminosities sedimented one upon another, mutually cancelling each other and yet together composing a new and different luminosity (only mentally separable into its various phases of growth, such is the hardness of the amalgam), and above all a vehicle through which real light, precisely \u201cnatural\u201d light, now repelled and now absorbed by the surface, articulates its structural rhythm and materially constructs the work\u2026<\/p>\n Cesare Vivaldi<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text admin_label=”1980″ module_id=”1980″ _builder_version=”4.21.0″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”]<\/p>\n \u2026 \u201cThere are men who are merely men of the earth, others who are men of the earth and the sky, and others who are men of the earth, the sky and infinity\u201d (Ren\u00e8 Char). Oscar Piattella belongs to this last species. His art reveals itself in the relationship it establishes with the different elements, excluding none. In his works everything questions and falls silent, meditates and glimmers through. When you believe yourself suspended in the sky, the back of your hand is enough to make you reconsider. The contact is geological. Beneath a light-repelling surface swept by the wind lies a rough and dense matter, viscous as pitch. But if you think you have become acquainted with the subterranean tars of primordial matter, you are soon disillusioned, because his creation reproduces and propagates itself along the deserted horizontals of beauty.<\/p>\n Ugo Amati<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text admin_label=”1982″ module_id=”1982″ _builder_version=”4.21.0″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”]<\/p>\n \u2026 The theme of the exhibition is: \u201cI muri\u201d. These are singular works arising from an exploration, from a stratification of continually reinvented memories. Almost like a traveller of centuries past, Oscar Piattella, through a personal \u201cGrand Tour\u201d, has gathered the most evocative images of walls \u2014 Badia di Fiesole, Tempio di Gabi (Rome), Palazzo Ducale di Urbino, Villa di Domiziano at Sabaudia, etc. \u2014 which he has, as it were, reconstructed at full scale. But this is no facile model-making, because in recreating these structures plastically, the artist has achieved results that go far beyond simple reproduction. Imitation, in fact, is never an end in itself; it is always the pretext for moving beyond a dimension of reality.<\/p>\n Luigi Lambertini<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u2026 A \u201cthird eye\u201d, Piattella\u2019s, possessing the tactile sense, within visual apprehension, of a material appropriation of the signs of time translated into the \u201cprimordial geometry\u201d of space, perhaps in order to find a \u201cdwelling place of immortality\u201d within the masonry work\u2026 But perhaps, more than the work in itself, aesthetically accessible, what interests the artist from Pesaro is the work\u2019s \u201cfor itself\u201d in the process of becoming, as a \u201crelic\u201d of his own \u201cbeing-there\u201d in the act of making. Thus \u201ctime changes into space\u201d, as Gu\u00e9non suggests; while, in parallel, the path of the \u201csign-maker\u201d Oscar Piattella transforms the space of the place back into the time of ritual, as an infinite metamorphosis in the retrieval of images forever undergoing circular transformation, from time to space and from space to time, within the magical suspension of an anamnesis relived by committing to memory the matter of its own passage through space and time.<\/p>\n Miklos N. Varga<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text admin_label=”1986″ module_id=”1986″ _builder_version=”4.21.0″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”]<\/p>\n \u2026 And indeed it is here that Piattella, investigator of Gubbio\u2019s masonry surfaces through the eye of the camera, successfully carries out the operation of translating pictorially, onto panels of unusual dimensions, both the masonry facing of S. Maria di Collemaggio in L\u2019Aquila (on another occasion he experiments with graphic-material variations on the theme of the \u201cmazzocchio\u201d, already investigated perspectivally by Paolo Uccello) and the facies of Roman pavement tessellations, as well as, through a reconnaissance into the mineral and vegetal world from which he gathers various materials to mix with his colours, walls corroded by time. He thus traces a clear path to be reconstructed, abstracting from a reality that preserves their memory but not their civil climate the inventions of man designed to place between himself and others the barrier of a screen, more or less solid, rough or ennobled by ornamental motifs, in order to preserve his need for solitude and intimacy\u2026<\/p>\n Carlo Melloni<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text admin_label=”1987″ module_id=”1987″ _builder_version=”4.21.0″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”]<\/p>\n \u2026 For thirty years Oscar Piattella (Pesaro 1932) has pursued his research with extreme rigour, conceding nothing to the moods of the season. \u201cIsolated\u201d among the Umbrian-Marche mountains, in Cantiano, yet highly attentive to the evolution of contemporary art, Piattella marks the subtle changes in his work only after long reflection. The paintings all originate in Oscar Piattella\u2019s fascination with walls, noble and humble alike, which, with an intense sense of history and painstaking patience, he photographs in Italy and abroad: from the early Informel representations, through the white conceptual geometrisations and the alchemical presence of gold or the scorching of material, we arrive at the latest works, dominated by blue. Thus the symbolism of the wall and the taste for manual elaboration are enhanced by a colour rich in references to concrete and dreamed realities and, above all, capable of producing a sense of infinity\u2026<\/p>\n Giorgio Bonomi<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Again in 1978, Metamorfosi infinita: \u201ca great panel of time, space, life, my work, where every gust of wind lifts a layer of dust and reveals more ancient signs, yet always ready to distil liquid memories\u201d. \u201cA panel expandable to infinity, where the perimeter is merely the act of giving oneself a rule, of establishing the terms of language: \u2026 a boundary so that everything may once again be called into question, so that there may still be something to say, so as to expand, and expand again, in time, in space, in life, retracing this infinity, the infinity of man, space, time\u201d. At this point, also thanks to the code the artist himself lucidly offers us, there can be no misunderstanding of his deliberate focus on the remains of ancient historic palaces as well as on more humble urban and rural masonry surfaces: places where there is indeed a dialogue with yesterday and its immediate connection with today, and also, unquestionably, an intention of systematic investigation, from which there emerged, among other things, in 1982, a magnificent book on Gubbio, produced collaboratively but entirely marked by Piattella\u2019s \u201cpoetics\u201d\u2026<\/p>\n Luciano Caramel<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u2026 Sitting on the sofa, I listen to Piattella recount his story, beginning with Paris, with the corroded, gutted walls of Paris, with mixtures of earth and glue on canvas. Since he is the one guiding the conversation, I have time to wonder how many times he has told this story, to whom, and why. He speaks while questioning me. I ask him about Pesaro, the city of his birth; the city of his youth takes on the faces of two artists. \u201cSandro Gallucci possessed great moral certainty, an aristocratic sensitivity towards things; he rendered the atmosphere around objects, interpreted still life as portrait, was open to the young, was a master; Nanni Valentini: everyone expected at any moment that he would emerge, he possessed enormous creative potential: he was the friend with whom I shared the studio, but death broke, interrupted\u2026\u201d A moment of intense emotion suspends the regular beat of time\u2026<\/p>\n Silvia Sassi Cuppini<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text admin_label=”1990″ module_id=”1990″ _builder_version=”4.21.0″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”]<\/p>\n \u2026 Matter, in fact, seems privileged only in order to exalt colour: hence this magical dialogue between gold and black in the pieces called \u201cicone\u201d. Should one not perhaps prefer those variations of blue and black on which Oscar Piattella has worked so extensively? Blue and black. Azure and night. Dark needles dart like flashes piercing the sky (Piccolo progetto). Irregular contours generate a lunar geography (Inverno). Piattella has expressed himself through the search for an \u201cidea of colour\u201d which he imagines ideally detached from \u201cturquoise, ultramarine, lapis lazuli, sky blue, indigo, cobalt\u201d. Thus Piattella moves away from every form of figuration. He wants colour to exist as such. Better still: he eludes it \u2014 as witness his white walls, shroud-walls whose surfaces must be scrutinised to reveal accidents and crumbling. A place of solitude, of contemplation. A mental place\u2026<\/p>\n Martine Arnault<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u2026 The plane is organised through grid structures, with interlocks recalling the pattern of masonry, from which they clearly derive: there is therefore an offset between the regular and uniform horizontal bands and, when read from top to bottom, the zigzagging progression of the sequence of 140 rectangles, which gives dynamism to the image. Within the individual units, this is further enlivened by the jagged edges of the burnt margins, which at times allow the lighter background to show through, producing effects of fragmented luminescence. To the point of recalling certain earlier solutions in which a system of serial, geometrically uniform chromatic zones was ignited at the points where narrow, multicoloured lines met, almost alluding to an underlying natural world, phenomenally varied, entering into a dialectical relationship with the artificiality of the analytical organisation of form. The stimulus, certainly, was the same \u2014 emotional participation, imagination, the senses \u2014 that now leads Piattella manifestly to transform backgrounds into skies, shifting from a mental notion towards the embodied sensation of being rooted in the phenomenon.<\/p>\n Luciano Caramel<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u2026 There is sorcery in this former chemist. It is indeed impossible to uncover the artist\u2019s technique as he inlays, with diabolical precision, small and large rectangular surfaces of canvas into his works, perhaps painted but more likely burnt by fire or acids. They emanate a pleasant impression of iridescence. But small-format works executed white on white (using a similar process), with infinitesimal reliefs, capture the gaze even more strongly\u2026<\/p>\n Marc H\u00e8riss\u00e8<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cHow can one fail to see that nature has a sense of depth? And how can one escape the dialectic of this ambiguous coquetry which, in so many organised beings, shows and conceals in such a way that organisation lives according to a rhythm of concealment and display?\u201d (Bachelard) Everything is openness and landscape in the works of Oscar Piattella; even the canvas itself might extend infinitely. His compositions attain a higher unity. As in walls, every stone links the part to the whole. In his latest works, light spreads through a broader \u201cweave\u201d. Only a few compositional lines remain, tracing the musical score of colour and giving rhythm to its undulations. There Oscar Piattella imposes a degree of contemplation in which colour becomes full and pure sensibility: \u201cColour is sensibility become matter, matter in its primordial state\u201d (Klein) \u2026<\/p>\n Virginie Gimaray<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n A mixture of architectural rigour and colour, Oscar Piattella leads us into a world of sensibility where everything reveals itself through time. The numerous pieces of dark fabric composing his most recent works are arranged with a certain rigidity, yet allow colours, often vivid, to show through, as though to give his works a balance, a kind of self-regulation. Beyond these small, skilfully arranged units, Oscar Piattella distils other elements over these expertly cut fragments of fabric, bringing before the eye the freedom of action on which the artist thrives. Treating matter as a sign, a reality, Oscar Piattella, caught between the coldness of old walls and an entirely Latin ardour of vivid colours and heightened sensibility, provokes through his works a search for balance and wisdom that affords the eye an undisguised pleasure\u2026<\/p>\n Alain Plas<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text admin_label=”1991″ module_id=”1991″ _builder_version=”4.21.0″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”]<\/p>\n \u2026 Thus, as though emerging from a long incubation, the present season finally arrives in 1984: a season in which Luciano Caramel has recently recognised \u201cthe tension towards a recovered elementarity, reached through new, essential walls, where those more specifically pictorial factors \u2014 in the direction of the luminous vibration of the surface, and also on the chromatic plane \u2014 which the previous, more conceptual interventions had inevitably relegated to a secondary level, now reclaim their primary citizenship\u201d. And from that chronological boundary to the present, the path of the painter from the Marche has opened, without breaks or concessions, towards results of consistently high quality, increasingly assured of themselves and of their own truth. They are walls of colour, grown from a single chromatic tone, constructed through the slow, patient ordering of rectangular units that often come to saturate the entire field of the pictorial page. At first sight, they appear to pursue the distant absoluteness, the chaste reticence of the monochrome, only slightly varied, yet never struck out of its icy mental measure by the subtle play of geometry. In reality, they are quite otherwise. They are walls of stirred senses, feverish pleasures, passions hoped for, pursued, touched by the hand: within the structuring order of geometrical partition, which has always been the canon Piattella needs in order to give voice to the deviations of the soul, the blind pleasures of instinct, the invincible melancholies of memory\u2026<\/p>\n Fabrizio D\u2019Amico<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text admin_label=”1993″ module_id=”1993″ _builder_version=”4.21.0″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”]<\/p>\n \u2026 This passionate defence of work pursued day after day, as a continuous experiential gesture passed through the filter of consciousness, takes the form of a moving testimony whose significance bears a strong ethical imprint. Some of these works bear the title Progetto, and my attention has focused in particular on one of them. It presents a central quadrangular image divided into numerous pieces of fabric, which overlaps, creating a slight relief, against a background likewise made of fabric, though with coarser and more irregular weaves. The chromatic note of \u201carrival\u201d is blue: indeed, the fabrics are permeated with it in differing qualities. The uneven blue of the background \u2014 although this is by no means a neutral background, but rather a spatiality fully defined as a pictorial fact \u2014 differs from the more intense blue of the units, each distinct from the others because the colour has settled upon them in heterogeneous quantities and qualities\u2026<\/p>\n Bruno Ceci<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text admin_label=”1994″ module_id=”1994″ _builder_version=”4.21.0″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”]<\/p>\n \u2026 The congruentia partium, manifest in the apse of San Murialdo, has in fact been present in Piattella\u2019s work from the outset in the relational relationship of the ile. And the apse is not a work external to his way of being, but the summa into which his painting and his ideas flow. The whole appears present within the part as the actuality of its meaning and the determination of its end. This applies to San Murialdo, but also to Piattella, because in both their actions accumulate: for the Saint, in the revelation of his holiness and in his understanding of the world as theophany; for the artist, as aesthetic consciousness and as the product of his history manifested in his style. In the grandeur of the apse, Piattella pursued \u2014 and succeeded in attaining \u2014 that unified whole from which beauty emanates, expressing in the visible the ineffability of the invisible. The tessera, in its determination, had previously tended towards the negation of the whole; in the apse the problem is reversed and resolved through synthesis, because the tesserae become the expression of a totalising activity\u2026<\/p>\n Francesco Lista<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u2026 Piattella has exploited the free expansion characteristic of watercolour \u2014 here intense, in tonal or jarring juxtapositions \u2014 to create undefined, metamorphic images; memories of pre-cultural landscapes, perhaps emerging from the individual modules that composed yesterday\u2019s paintings. Colour in a state of becoming, ignited by primordial glimmers or lost among mysterious shadows; colour that becomes space and spills into several dimensions within abscissas and ordinates that are now discreet rather than repressive. In other words, it is as though a less uncompromising Mondrian had decided to regulate the Informel without suppressing emotion. Within this context of hints at geometrical order and vaporous chromaticism, a dialogical relationship arises between intentional \/and spontaneous structure, between the \u201cpresent\u201d and the \u201cbeyond\u201d, restraining romantic abandon\u2026<\/p>\n Luciano Marucci<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u2026 The narrative present in these latest works by Oscar Piattella no longer concerns the natural referent that gives substance to his work, but his own history in relation to the rest of the world, his life as an artist and his making within nature, within the world, within the place. With ever greater tenacity and passion he continues to explain and clarify the sources, references and allusions that surround and precede the birth of the work: it is less and less the story of the tree or the wall, and increasingly the story of the artist Oscar Piattella, which is also the unique reason for the meaning of his art: \u201cThe place is you\u201d and \u201cThings are mythical insofar as they are yours\u201d. At this stage of Piattella\u2019s research, the mythical reason underlying his artistic making brings him closer to the origin, a step away from foundation and birth. Female organs appear, nervous, aggressive signs, vague images, never figures. They explode upon the walls and trees, invade the surface of the work, impose a single, powerful meaning: woman, eros, birth, origin\u2026<\/p>\n Antonella Micaletti<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text admin_label=”1995″ module_id=”1995″ _builder_version=”4.21.0″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”]<\/p>\n \u2026 Thus these watercolours came into being: like a sudden vertigo along the course of a long and steadfast journey. And, like a wave of freedom, with them was born that luxuriant colour that fills them; and there arrived those clear, at times clamorous lights that flood them. Woven through with light, and beside it dazed by shadow, colour rears up, swells with pride, rises into figure; then collapses and falls asleep in slow nocturnal whirlpools. Within its body, now turgid, now weary, there grow explicitly \u2014 perhaps as never before in Piattella, except, at times, in certain paintings of the early 1960s tormented by matter \u2014 suggestions of a horizon, a cloud, sea foam, a face. Naturally, it is not any banal referential temptation that now triggers this re-entry of the image, but rather the way in which today\u2019s new freedom allows memory \u2014 always a firm building stone in Piattella\u2019s painting \u2014 to resurface in scattered traces. Painting of colour, then: certainly aware of the extraordinarily high tradition that colour has written within the history of contemporary painting. And yet Piattella\u2019s watercolours of today do not wish to surrender completely to that fascination. Just as they keep one of their founding expressive canons bound to the dimension of memory, so too they recover within themselves at least two other ancient vocations of the painter. One, and the most evident, lies in that retained intention to divide the surface of the painting into geometrical partitions: although, compared with before, reduced to essentials, to the simple indication of an abscissa that comes to coincide with the horizon line.<\/p>\n Fabrizio D\u2019Amico<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text admin_label=”1996″ module_id=”1996″ _builder_version=”4.21.0″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”]<\/p>\n \u2026 Here the ancient stasis is reborn, with a poetic intensity perhaps never previously attained: Piattella\u2019s enduring war between Logos and Cosmos. We had already sensed this \u201castanza\u201d \u2014 to use Brandi\u2019s term \u2014 in some of the paintings from the \u2018Superficie\u2019 cycles of \u201989 and \u2018Azzurro\u2019 of the following year. But in \u2018Ociroe\u2019 and \u2018Zeuxo\u2019 (to mention just two of the nine splendid prints conceived by Piattella), every structure, every architecture has disappeared: the signs, filaments and masses that burst into these \u201cnocturnes\u201d appear free from every boundary, from every predetermined form. And it seems genuinely impossible that, using the means proper to printmaking and superimposed matrices, Vincenzo Tiboni, printer of the \u2018Posterula\u2019 in Urbino, was able to restore to us so completely that volatile and unstable quality that distinguishes Piattella\u2019s palette\u2026<\/p>\n Floriano De Santi<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text admin_label=”1997″ module_id=”1997″ _builder_version=”4.21.0″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”]<\/p>\n \u2026 \u201cWith Time\u201d I have followed with Sympathy the results of Oscar Piattella\u2019s \u201cWork\u201d (Young Hermit of the Coloured Abysses): from the \u201cMuroritmo\u201d, to the \u201cCombustioni\u201d, to the problems of the \u201cQuadrato\u201d, up to the mature surfaces that I would define as the object: \u201cAcque Lucide\u201d. His was a pictorial search climbing upward from the Infernos of Material feeling and practical Reason towards the beyond: slowly, slowly, higher and higher, to the summit, passing through the distilled Baths of Canvas with the Elixir of the Shining Plane. I shall tell you only of his latest Cartographies in Liquid Dreams. First, the Canvas of the World is patiently dyed: by ancestral memories and even by mental eclipses; then, humbly, an attempt is made to recognise chaos but not to control it. And so from the damp basement of the unconscious there emerge and provoke evanescent bluish islands, with golden profiles, which ought to be real within His Vision of Aeropainting of the Transcendental Field Experience. With Oscar-like finesse, Piattella paints with humour his wandering landscapes traced with floating yet circumstantial Celestial Secrets. From cosmic pollen to the heart of a fossil, from the culmination of a flash to twenty thousand leagues under the sea, from a night crossed by a comet to the scent of a violet, everything can be recorded by Oscar with the enthusiasm and certainty that fixing a \u201cPainting\u201d is not in vain\u2026<\/p>\n Bruno Ceccobelli<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u2026 Several paintings by Oscar Piattella bear the title Gemmazione. Here appears what Gaston Bachelard (La Terre et les r\u00e8veries de la volont\u00e8, 1948) calls, among other dreams, \u201cthe petrifying reverie\u201d. Gems, precious stones, are dreamed. Diamond, aquamarine, amethyst, beryl, emerald, chalcedony, carbuncle, lapis lazuli, sapphire, topaz, turquoise\u2026 Precious stones are colours, fires, jets. In other words, painting is born from shattered gems. Virginia Woolf observes (in Orlando): \u201cWhen bright colours such as blue and yellow mingle in our gaze, a little dust remains in our thoughts\u201d. Thus lapis lazuli and topaz enter painting, eyes, memories. Or again, ordinary walls, because of their stains, are themselves as precious as diamond and emerald. Piattella insists upon Leonardo da Vinci\u2019s stain. In his notebooks Leonardo da Vinci proposes opening the intellect to different inventions: \u201cIf you look at walls stained with blotches or made of stones of different kinds, (\u2026) you will see in them different landscapes, mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, plains, broad valleys and different hills. You will discover battles and figures in rapid movement, strange expressions on faces and exotic garments, and an infinity of things that you will be able to reduce to distinct and well-conceived forms\u201d\u2026<\/p>\n Gilbert Lascault<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text admin_label=”1998″ module_id=”1998″ _builder_version=”4.21.0″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”]<\/p>\n \u2026 Oscar Piattella has become aware of the Origin that made possible the Beginning of his artistic development and, by adhering to it, has freed himself from possible entanglements and deceptions; and by freeing himself, he has been able to bring forth every possibility of poetry, every possibility of meaning that was in nuce. From a primordial language, he has constructed a singular and living tongue. And so here are yellows condensed and heightened against black, spreading out in swellings of light; here are weaves of black and brown concealing thin sheets of brightness and allowing light to advance beyond them; here is a sandblasting of greys which, within the carmine mixture, deny their own neutrality and once again open passages for the gurgles and sobs of luminosity; here are mountains and wall and books of blue in subtle and ambiguous symbiosis with gold, speaking the form of light, giving form to light\u2026<\/p>\n Ettore Bonessio di Terzet<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text admin_label=”1999″ module_id=”1999″ _builder_version=”4.21.0″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”]<\/p>\n \u2026 Here is Piattella\u2019s \u201cmatter\u201d, altered, mixed, amalgamated, intermingled, diffused in gemmations, proposed through differences and similarities, evaporating and recomposing itself: here it offers itself \u201cin a lightning something\u201d, compelling us to think in poetry. Gianni D\u2019Elia, indeed, who is a true poet, has written a magical introduction for the exhibition catalogue, fixing between analysis and emotion that mysterious intellectual relationship that can arise between human beings and matter \u2014 nature and language, future and memory, colours and feelings \u2014 by virtue of art\u2026<\/p>\n Ivana Baldassarri<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u2026 In the now long pictorial history of Oscar Piattella there is a profound constant to which he has not always given direct voice, yet which by now substantially characterises his creative development. It is certainly an instinctive reference to materiality as the foundation of a \u201cbeing-there\u201d that intimately feels its relationship with reality as an environmental totality: first and foremost nature, but also history. Nature as an enveloping presence, yet never perceived as a distance that is in some measure landscape-like (and not so much because his choice as a painter very quickly proved intentionally non-representational), but as the imminence of a relationship, close listening, direct and sensitively alert confrontation, at the same time propelled into the depth of memory. But also the history of humankind. Of man, who over time has constructed signs of his will to oppose to natural disorder an order of his own, different yet not therefore unnatural. This, in the end, is the great formative lesson of the central Italian, Urbino-based proto-Renaissance culture.<\/p>\n Enrico Crispolti<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u2026 I wondered about intuition, prompted by seeing and by the subsequent listening to that vision within the memory of the work: but it was certainly also a listening to the man, to the living being, to the person before me, to the artist in flesh and blood, to his way of opening himself and confiding in someone only recently met as though that person were a living member of his family, someone always known; and then the etymology of feeling, and not only that of word and concept, reveals itself: one does not come to know the person one meets, but meets the person one (already) knows \u2014 the expansiveness of the child-artist, his desire to communicate with the other, with other spaces, with other times. It seemed to me that I was continuing one of my walks by the sea, along the shore of the city and of the age. At that point all categories fall away: realism, abstraction, Informel. Oysters encased with Vinavil glue on the canvas prick like stars, as do layers of earth dusts, sands and fragments, the sublime architecture of leaves, their crown woven by a wind that seems still and gentle, in love with every molecule of space-time and life; recalling to us the incredible poetry of matter transformed into energy, into a value and a courtesy that the admirer of Piattella\u2019s paintings can only attempt to recognise as evocations of the stilnovista tradition; seeking to return the spirituality of matter to our great vernacular tradition which, from Giotto to Dante, stands at the origin of every avant-garde still possible\u2026<\/p>\n Gianni D\u2019Elia<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text admin_label=”2002″ module_id=”2002″ _builder_version=”4.21.0″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”]<\/p>\n And here is Oscar Piattella. Is it not perhaps the same intuition that guides his work when we see him bent over things that exist only at the limits of form, gathered things, material-things, things from which there rises what remains this side of our gaze as soon as it devotes itself to action, entrusts itself to language \u2014 in other words, almost constantly? Oscar Piattella, then, is another of those witnesses to the elemental whom we need in order to remind ourselves of the transcendence of being over the word, to keep alive within ourselves this other of meaning that calls us back to what is truest in us; for after all, beneath the thin surface of the self lies the same unsayable depth as the mass of the world. And confirmation of this level at which his artistic commitment is situated lies, first and foremost, in his way of using colour. It is rooted in an absolute black, a black that is not that of night but of the interior of things, the black of the absolutely unpenetrated, the black of the place where the very idea of black no longer has meaning; and under the sign of this fossil-carbon it is essentially material colour, colour such as one does not see on the surface of the world except when the world drags to the surface what lies beneath. And blue, yes, often \u2014 Oscar loves blue, and with what fervour \u2014 but then it is blue as when one sees it intensifying, hollowing itself into the summer sky, an absolute that draws the mind towards the non-visible, the unthinkable: that vertiginous silence of falling into the sky, of falling endlessly into the blue of the sky, of which children are capable, of which adults are capable\u2026<\/p>\n Yves Bonnefoy<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n On other occasions I have written about Oscar Piattella\u2019s painting: and \u2014 I realise now as I look back over those pages, some by now distant in time \u2014 always speaking of a latent conflict within his image, of an at times harsh clash in his painting between one place of the mind and another, within the project constructed around it. Between matter and matter (abraded, forbidden; or, conversely, almost voluptuously encouraged to dream itself); between colour and structure, between memory and immediacy; between light and shadow. In that conflict, I believed I could recognise the spark that would ultimately guarantee the image its distinctiveness. Today, faced with Piattella\u2019s most recent works, I am tempted, at least initially, to speak \u2014 differently \u2014 of an integrity, a fullness, an achieved concord: because before these latest canvases one genuinely senses a journey that has reached a culmination, a good place of its own in which the long, slow reasonings about painting, about what constitutes it, about what is permitted and forbidden to it, have subsided and, as it were, stepped aside, leaving the field open to an effusion of his talents now entirely free, capable of gathering within a single image what was previously dispersed.<\/p>\n Fabrizio D\u2019Amico<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Piattella\u2019s life too seems, in a certain way, to be one long, vibrant retentissement, an echo that rises and changes as it frays into the air and runs among the oaks, while the decades of life and love also pass. From this echo of nature and of its interpreters \u2014 the wind, the rock, the rose-coloured stone of Catria, the arriving snow, the meagre shrubs, the green oak, the sawn trunk, the walls of Genga sweating water \u2014 this reverberation comes in search of a canvas, a panel, a table on which to rest, a two-dimensional form. Taking part in the quiet industry of this workshop is the most famous romantic pair in European poetry: the feeling of time and the rediscovered place. Two dominant thoughts, two dimensions of existence that Piattella arranges side by side as on the pages of the herbalist. Secure in his mountain refuge, Piattella opens every path to these feelings; his daily life \u2014 after all \u2014 is dense with assaults by nature, encountered at every step, at every glance. It is no coincidence that his origins as a painter are linked to the Informel, the expressive season nourished by everything earthly. The longest among his most expressive periods is that devoted to walls, and now his painting is seeking the colours and scents of a nature \u2014 that of ferns and shells \u2014 that is even luxuriant. Later, it will be ready to transform itself into light.<\/p>\n Andrea Emiliani<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u2026 I remember a sea of drawings, most of them executed in pencil or charcoal. They were the visible sign of rapid gestures that had left their traces. So numerous and so close to one another were these traces that at times they overlapped, eventually appearing as a magmatic matter. Some drawings were coloured, in an intense blue or in red, yellow, rarely ochre. Oscar Piattella\u2019s production of drawings is intense, as that of any painter or sculptor should always be, since drawing is the point of departure and arrival of every visual artist and the training ground in which the hand exercises without cease. But his pictorial production is no less substantial. Having begun as a material Informel painter in the 1950s (the other Informel, the gestural one, as already noted, remained characteristic of his drawing, while in his painting technique it is matter that conquers him with its infinite suggestions), despite touching upon other directions over the years (such as an interest in Nuova Pittura and monochrome surfaces), he has remained fundamentally faithful to his origins, returning, thirty years later, to present himself anew through a neo-Informel that remains material in nature.<\/p>\n Armando Ginesi<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Harmony, balance, serenity, modesty and discretion are certainly the new goals \u2014 less rhetorical and triumphalist than those of the past \u2014 to be discovered or reaffirmed. In this respect Piattella\u2019s path is linear and admirable, from the landscape to the elements of which it is composed. One might say, and it is no paradox, that by beginning with landscape he investigated across vast expanses the essence of a genre usually expressed on an entirely different scale: still life. But his path continues beyond this like a humble gift; it goes on to emphasise the essence of the creative act, which knows how to decompose but also to compose, which neither loses its way nor fears to acknowledge the poverty and essential nature of reality.<\/p>\n Francesco Scoppola<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text admin_label=”2004″ module_id=”2004″ _builder_version=”4.21.0″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”]<\/p>\n Piattella, with the new matter \u2014 painting in its pure state, without mediation \u2014 simultaneously brings shadow and light into the foreground. The solidified yet light structures transcribe his inner torment; the lights press forward; with him we enter the magic of imagination. It is a sequence of signs and inventions that reconstruct the structural universe from which he began almost fifty years ago; a universe to which he has returned with the stubborn force of acquired awareness. He moves towards light and through mother-of-pearl expresses emotions; just as he once spoke through tufa, coal and every material of Nature (now finally to be written with a capital N), with mother-of-pearl he achieves an expressive model that, ideally and culturally, moves towards conquering the luminosity within things. Throughout its millennial history, painting has brought light onto things. Without abandoning the subterranean, the secret, oblivion, which we sense as a watermark beneath it all; but also without any longer exalting darkness, shadow, earth, coal, the black from which he began.<\/p>\n Mauro Corradini<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n How do I imagine Piattella before he paints? I do not see him setting off en plein air with his easel, with a predilection for the Impressionist exaltation of nature; rather, enclosed within his workshop, I see him like a monk intent upon meditation and upon establishing a direct relationship with his own memory, where the traces of the physicality of matter are deposited \u2014 matter which, like a skilled alchemist, he uses in the proper dosage for his paintings. This is the theoretical substratum of an avant-garde investigation that serves him as a pretext for externalising his own self and the related Pirandellian facets that each of us is condemned to preserve. His is a painting in an actual-affective relationship with existential thought (in this regard, since the term wall was used a moment ago, how could one fail to recall Sartre\u2019s extremely well-known 1939 work entitled \u201cLe Mur\u201d?). Its philosophical and even epistemological stamp seems unquestionable to me, bringing to mind Piattella\u2019s degree in pharmacy; a logical-scientific stamp that does not prevent his rapid progress towards refinement and lyrical sensitivity.<\/p>\n Leo Strozzieri<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Among the various phases of Oscar Piattella\u2019s now extensive and established artistic path, one characteristic feature is seriality<\/i>: his entirely individual way of identifying an essential poetic theme, first recognising it among the daily shadows of the unconscious, locating and reiterating it within a space \u2014 or, more precisely, causing it to arise within that space as though through an effect of concretion of moving generative fields \u2014 inventing a form through which it can enter representation, and seeking in nature whatever mineral or vegetal element may transform it into painting. Thus leaves or casts of leaves, gravel or pebbles, fragments or lumps of various kinds, shells or other things emerge in relief upon the canvas, roughening it, almost as though seeking to violate every reassuring plastic aestheticism through a backwards journey aimed at the physical and mental reconstruction of an original and pre-human, prehistoric space, where body and skin belong solely to the earth and where animal and human presence exists only as trace, imprint, omen, fossil, a lunar wasteland of the gaze. In short, a painting of the world using its fragments, superimposing upon it the dreamlike colouring of the artist\u2019s own visionary imagination. But if this were all, one might indeed believe it to be a mere exercise in technique and in the reproposal of the existing through the selection and reassembly of parts into a whole; whereas instead \u2014 and this is above all what makes the difference \u2014 the material instrument and the natural and archaeological find (or rather the archetypal and symbolic one) are subjected to an extraordinarily meticulous process of excavation and reinvention by virtue of the specificity of pictorial practice, which makes the things selected and elevated into form other<\/i> than their original identity through cutting, filing, placement on the canvas, inlay, frottage<\/i> or gluing.<\/p>\n Fabio Scotto<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n It is in that place at the foot of the Apennines that the artist works, with lucid awareness and, at the same time, the acuity of a metaphorical gaze; this charges his \u201cpanels\u201d (Piattella paints on multilayer plywood panels fixed to wooden frames) with a magical fascination that has always characterised his work and which, at this latest stage, defines it through a personal impulse towards revelation and light, expressed through an implacable dialectic of materials: coloured earths, coal, anthracite, graphite, gold, mother-of-pearl. Through these materials Piattella has, over the years, defined the growth of the vitality released precisely also through their conflict. It appeared immediately clear to me, when I met him in the early 1970s (I am referring to the last century), that Piattella had by then decisively excluded the moment of contemplation and, certainly, at that time this was indeed the case.<\/p>\n Vitaliano Angelini<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text admin_label=”2005″ module_id=”2005″ _builder_version=”4.21.0″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”]<\/p>\n Underlying the teeming surface is a vegetal weave that makes use of pause through softened shapes, through form\u2019s ability to break free of its imprisonment. It is a structure governed not so much by the superimposition of figures as by the natural configuration of foliage, whose veins guide the spectator\u2019s wandering gaze. It is the leaf\u2019s talent for becoming image, not through the addition of meanings, but because it is a filter of knowledge as nature, memory, revelation. Space becomes crowded, at the margins of the negation of emptiness. Like a borderland which, in attempting to cross the limit, is interrupted, further sanctioning the distance between the two degrees of organicity. A glimpse, an avenue of fallen leaves that abruptly disappears into asphalt. The sharp delimitation would thus acquire greater meaning, in the attempt at dialogue, if possible, between nature and human progress. On one side, the coldness of uniformity, of rationalising human necessity; on the other, the chaos that nature gives to reality.<\/p>\n Elena Piaggesi<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u2014 This is our gift \u2014 the two said sorrowfully \u2014 so that your design may be fulfilled: the gold of our masters will unite with your other precious materials; earth and sky will be able to confront each other again, and thus shores and leaves will tell of passages that have not destroyed their beauty; lands of blood will become fields of light\u2026 and so too the light pages of pollen or snow: they will be more than themselves. A feeling of time and a welcoming of distant and nearby matter, the coexistence of landscapes. Then human beings will return, their scattered selves, to your new dwellings\u2026 \u2014 Thus the two Florentine merchants spoke in a single breath. Then they climbed back onto the shuttle and soon disappeared from sight, waving their hands in farewell. We remained silent, watching the miracle of departure and disappearance\u2026 \u2014 Now I have everything I have sought!.. \u2014 the farmer friend pronounced, moved \u2014 Germinations and earthly concretions, vital remains of surfaces and depths, natural colours and forms, celestial imaginings\u2026 Now I can go\u2026 So it is your turn, master of the earth\u2019s lost song!.. recreate the beauty and light that dazzled us as children!.. Meanwhile, we shall return to our innermost shores. (And I too, thus, between melancholy and trust, took my leave of the dream. Amid Oscar Piattella\u2019s inexhaustible natures, in his Cantiano workshop.)<\/p>\n Eugenio De Signoribus<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text admin_label=”2006″ module_id=”2006″ _builder_version=”4.21.0″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”]<\/p>\n And just as it is not so much the act of flying as that of alighting on a flower that the image of the butterfly evokes, so Piattella\u2019s painting does not seem to rise swiftly towards who knows what infinite skies, but rather to descend into the slow, expanded depth of every element of nature. The titles of the works, moreover, make explicit references to the earth (fields, mountains, grass, flowers, trees, moss\u2026), to the sky (cloud, wind, snow\u2026), to water, to fire. Terms whose semantic field is anthropological are brought back into this naturalistic sphere: those of breath, caress, eyes. Having passed from the existential to the existent, Piattella enters naturally<\/i> into the matter, colour and form of the world: the step is imperceptible, the silence perfect, the respect absolute. The world then becomes another<\/i> thing. So too art, which must re<\/i>give matter, colour and form to the world, creates an other<\/i> world. Piattella says: \u201cThe painter does not see the invisible in things, but only the things that are not there<\/i>\u201d.<\/p>\n Michele Polverari<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text admin_label=”2007″ module_id=”2007″ _builder_version=”4.21.0″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”]<\/p>\n There is a road to travel: Piattella is going beyond. He does not know how to stop; he advances, daring, excited by the discovery of the rainbow. Now the colours multiply. And just when you think you have understood his ability to interpret the laws of nature: \u201cBut no \u2014 he corrects you \u2014 there is something in nature that cannot be seen. It cannot be seen because it is not there, in actuality. Yet there is what you read into it, what you see in it. Every painting gives the viewer its own message: but that message no longer belongs to me, who paint it; it becomes yours, belonging to you who look at it.\u201d Wait a moment: are those not flowers, windows, diamonds, bark, hills, houses appearing among luminous geometries which, to us, finally seem flung open onto reality? \u201cBut what is reality? \u2014 Piattella reasons. \u2014 Is it represented by the geometrical phrasing that sets the plants within it, or by these openings onto nature, as it would seem more logical to think? For me, logic is more real; more real are the structures you do not see in nature and that I read and imagine in this way.\u201d He points, following with his finger the intersection of two perpendicular axes.<\/p>\n Lucilla Niccolini<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Colour-form, as a unit of measure for all things, as a free and autonomous language that is, without mediation and immediately, also content, has always guided Piattella\u2019s work. Synthesis, clearly, no longer lies in the iron control of Renaissance perspective, but in the magical and lucid investigation of matter becoming light. Ultimately, as I have already had occasion to emphasise, a light evocatively analogous to that of Piero: a light \u2014 from the same places, moreover \u2014 that seeks the reasons and poetry of things. But Piattella is also a sublime alchemist: one cannot help thinking of that degree in pharmacy, perhaps only apparently without consequence. An impulse \u2014 and also a concrete body of knowledge \u2014 towards the analysis of elements, the mixing of components, in pursuit of that formula which saves, regenerates, but only if skilfully prepared, patiently assembled, passionately cultivated. All this is made possible by an aura of magic that always accompanies him, follows him, surrounds him: the secret of the great, which we shall never entirely penetrate and which, for that very reason, will always have something to say\u2026<\/p>\n Anna Maria Ambrosini<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text admin_label=”2009″ module_id=”2009″ _builder_version=”4.21.0″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”]<\/p>\n But this could not happen if a third element did not enter the scene of pictorial representation. I am speaking of light, which is a factor of fundamental importance in Piattella\u2019s art. Light intrinsic to the work, but also external light, captured from the surrounding atmospheres or resolved within the material compound by that gold which this highly accomplished artist manipulates with a skill equal to that of the ancient Byzantine or medieval masters. On another occasion I had the opportunity to write that his \u201cpainting becomes rituality, liturgy\u201d and that it \u201crefers back to the idea of the Transcendent, the Absolute, the Other-than-self\u201d. I wrote this in connection with the 2002 solo exhibition at Palazzo Gradari in Pesaro. Today I confirm those words, while renewing my conviction that Oscar Piattella\u2019s painting is the equivalent of pictorial verse of the highest quality. Like that written by his great friend and admirer, the French poet Yves Bonnefoy.<\/p>\n Armando Ginesi<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text disabled_on=”on|on|on” _builder_version=”4.21.0″ _module_preset=”default” disabled=”on” global_colors_info=”{}”]<\/p>\n \u2026 In Piattella there is an instinct, a genuine plastic and natural instinct that saves him from easy solutions. To be convinced of this, one need only look at his ink drawings, his notebooks, where the nature of his surroundings is studied in details and fragments: hedges, roots, waves and rock formations, botany and anatomy. During his university years, the young pharmacist must have had a genuine passion for Leonardo\u2019s notebooks. But let us not go so far. Let us keep an eye on this laconic and likeable young man, who knows how to shake hands with an old-fashioned, energetic vehemence.<\/p>\n Raffaele Carrieri<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u2026 The painting once again becomes a diary of things seen, albeit filtered through the screen of individual emotion. Where we do not find this direct inspiration, this correspondence with a local reality, with a chosen landscape, there may perhaps be reason for mistrust. Consider, as compelling examples, the poetic sincerity of Tap\u00eces, of a Chighine. A reactionary argument, perhaps, cutting the wings of too many flights into the realms of the esoteric and Byzantine obscurity. But Piattella is truly a painter who is at once spontaneous and highly refined. Intuitively, he has succeeded in combining the allusive force and candid pathos of the early Utrillo with the equally poignant irony of Dubuffet. He possesses a power of synthesis between composition and colour, between light and graphic invention, of a kind rarely encountered. His canvases vibrate with a sensibility composed of excitement and melancholy. One will notice explorations of language in various directions, always, however, along the path of a lyrical transposition of the natural image. These are stages in his solitary work, declared without artifice. And the drawings (that beautiful album of notes, so intense, genuine and immediate) confirm the judgement as to the sincerity of inspiration and the quality of stylistic invention of this new painter\u2026<\/p>\n Franco Russoli<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u2026 If Fautrier, of whom we have just finished speaking, stands at the origin, the paintings and inks by Oscar Piattella exhibited at the Ariete are one of its consequences: and the derivation can be understood if one bears in mind that the new painter, a pharmacist from Pesaro and self-taught in painting, is not yet thirty. But once this observation has been made, it is only right to state all the reasons that separate and distinguish him. As I have indicated many times, however, within young Italian painting it is possible to discern, within a non-figurative area, a strong aspiration to reopen a dialogue with the real world, with the seasons, with the emotions and adventures of landscape, for the moment within a space and with accents that are preferably intimate and lyrical. The painting, that is, as Franco Russoli says in presenting Piattella\u2019s first Milan exhibition, becomes once again a diary of things seen. Self-taught, says the catalogue: but there is no doubt that the painter is extremely well informed about everything taking place in Italian art in this direction\u2026<\/p>\n Marco Valsecchi<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n \u2026 In an area of profound quiet, where it is still possible to meditate with ease, he has turned his gaze towards the stars, which reveal their presence in a gleam of precise light or in a halo of mystery, amid the immensity of the night skies. Without provoking anguished shocks or delirious emotions, without seeking to astonish, he now offers us a contemplation of Leopardian measure, within an order that is at once intellectual and lyrical.<\/p>\n Luigi Dania<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n \u2026 His imagination does not underestimate a continuous body\/light relationship; nor does it deprive light of its concrete, natural foundation, of its dependence \u2014 as far as colour is concerned \u2014 on other elements. It is not directed, in short, towards the creation of some possible planetary mythology (Vasarely, for example), even through personal and different means, but rather towards the expression of an earthly mythology. Yet Piattella could not be understood without saying that, as he proceeds, he carries out, on these foundations, a logical operation capable of removing any suspicion of facile recourse to effects devoid of meaning. What matters to him is also to fix a depth, a form, a movement contained within a global image in which light is not, so to speak, abstracted from its sources, nor deprived of its lyrical force.<\/p>\n Roberto Sanesi<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n \u2026 Thus Piattella has his own thematic thread of evocative lyricism, unfolding around an emblematic figure which, in the most varied evocative forms, has been the axis of his painting for many years: the theme of the tree \u2014 or rather, as he himself tells me, \u201cnot only of the tree, but of the skies, the clouds, the sea, man, woman, origin\u201d. It is clear, then, that the tree is an extreme, primordial, all-encompassing term: the tree of life, and the Leopardian boundary facing infinity, a revealer of time, of the eternal rhythm of the seasons, of the transient rhythm of life, a cosmic and affective, even sentimental symbol. It is a presence that Piattella articulates over the years in the most diverse ways, from a vaguely imaginative evocativeness, in profiles or sections, to the more indirect transpositions of recent years into chromatic and luminous confetti (solo exhibition at galleria l\u2019Ariete in May \u201968), up to the very recent strips of sky, \u201cthese stratifications of skies, luminescent visions of landscape situations and, in a more intimate relationship, condensations of memory, memories that surface and disappear, slowly, or with timeless speed, magical premonitions of a superhuman dimension\u201d.<\/p>\n Enrico Crispolti<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u2026 Oscar Piattella\u2019s painting \u2014 at \u201cArtivisive\u201d \u2014 constitutes an example of an authenticity free from the constraints of trends and capable of absorbing cultural stimuli and the demands of human relationships with an autonomy of vision free from any pressing reference. His position seems, in a certain sense, to be \u201canthropocentric\u201d, in the sense of a personal modulation of inventions and modulations expressed through a chromatic tension which, while clearly abstract in tone, nevertheless always proceeds from a concentrated, personal visual responsibility.<\/p>\n Sandra Orienti<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u2026 The theme of this painting unfolds as the evolution of a very precise iconography, that of the tree, understood also and above all in an emblematic sense: the tree of life, a cycle completed from root to fruit, a rhythm renewed upon the hinges of life and death. The tree, with its crown expanding into a circle, becomes the geometrically perfect circle, symbol of infinity without alpha or omega. But apart from an investigation of content, certain relationships of colour are interesting for the extraordinary vibrations of light \u2014 and, I would say, even of sound \u2014 that they create. These orderly, meticulous spirals disappear towards the depths of an unlimited space, an unbridgeable abyss of motionless time\u2026<\/p>\n Maria Torrenti Foti<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u2026 After the Bernheimer exhibition, the week offers us another welcome surprise: Oscar Piattella\u2019s solo exhibition at Artivisive. Although he has already exhibited in distinguished galleries (twice at the Ariete in Milan and once at the Medusa in Rome), Piattella is still an almost unknown name: it is no coincidence that Crispolti, the enthusiastic presenter of this exhibition, speaks of a \u201cPiattella\u201d case. Secluded in a small town in the Pesaro area, the painter in fact works \u201cwithin his own dimension of space and time, which he has naturally chosen and above all preserved and cultivated as the very place in which his independence becomes possible\u201d. Piattella\u2019s large abstract paintings, with broad transverse zones or circles of velvety, pulsating colour, derive not so much from Morris Louis, Vasarely or Bill as from Rothko. But whereas in the American painter light is never naturalistic and is entirely mental, Piattella\u2019s always retains a connection with nature.<\/p>\n Lorenza Trucchi<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n \u2026 And so Piattella today confronts colour-light directly, without any symbolic mediation. The distillation of his painting, which has reached an almost extreme point of renouncing everything that is not directly essential, has led him to an abstraction laden with meaning. The elegy, the \u201ccondensation of memory\u201d of which Crispolti spoke, filled with resonances that are not naturalistic but \u201cnatural\u201d, is expressed through the minimum of means: colour as \u201clight\u201d, the painting as a \u201cfield\u201d of luminous energies, within which light is modulated and inflected in ways that are always the same and always different.<\/p>\n Cesare Vivaldi<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n \u2026 I only wish to add, in this testimony for a friend whom I esteem, that at times the art of today no longer analyses the relationship between the \u201cself\u201d and what lies \u201coutside the self\u201d, but, anti-historically, only one term of that relationship: hence, perhaps, the anguish, the gratuitousness of constructions based solely on intellect or solely on manual skill. Piattella restores the problem to its proper dimension, without ignoring the \u201craisons du coeur\u201d, but conducting his experience under the sign of awareness\u2026<\/p>\n Claudio Verna<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n \u2026 One should bear in mind the great cultural tradition according to which, to use the words of Giordano Bruno, \u201c\u2026 providence has ordained that (man) should be occupied in action by his hands, and in contemplation by his intellect; so that he does not contemplate without action and does not act without contemplation\u201d. It is the philosophical tradition according to which the whole is reflected in every smallest thing, so that the inner tension animating Oscar Piattella in his privateer\u2019s war \u2014 (a piratical war, but of loyalist stamp!) \u2014 is the same tension in which our civilisation is struggling at this moment in its history.<\/p>\n Giulio Angelucci<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n \u2026 The titles accompanying Oscar Piattella\u2019s exhibition are: Grande Narciso, Piccolo Narciso, Il Settebello, Dieci per un Nero, Acquarello Primo. The exhibition is an analysis of light seen as pictorial matter, conjugated across the surface of the canvas through various modulations. \u201cA work conceived solely in relation to light and its caress, without which it would not exist,\u201d Cesare Vivaldi writes in his preface, \u201cin the same way that the Braille alphabet is conceived for the caress of a blind person\u2019s hands.\u201d The work reveals colour\u2019s ability to capture the luminous element, and the capacity of the pictorial surface to transmit small refractions, subtle impulses of light. The exhibition moves within an analytical dialectic in which painting reflects upon its own status and grammars, and a synthetic one in which painting and seeing become functions of existence\u2026<\/p>\n Achille Bonito Oliva<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u2026 Light is always reabsorbed into itself: white upon white, black upon black, every painting by Piattella is a surface in which, to use Ungaretti\u2019s words, \u201call vain light was drunk\u201d. \u201cNatural\u201d light has disappeared, distorted into the absolute of snow or that of coal, yet it has left behind its essential terms (its references), the traces of its passage, of its coagulation within the fixed tracks of chromatic thicknesses, within the geometrical, rigorous, infinitely patient application of a pictorial matter laboriously worked, layer after layer, film after film: a coagulation of different luminosities sedimented one upon another, mutually cancelling each other and yet together composing a new and different luminosity (only mentally separable into its various phases of growth, such is the hardness of the amalgam), and above all a vehicle through which real light, precisely \u201cnatural\u201d light, now repelled and now absorbed by the surface, articulates its structural rhythm and materially constructs the work\u2026<\/p>\n Cesare Vivaldi<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n \u2026 \u201cThere are men who are merely men of the earth, others who are men of the earth and the sky, and others who are men of the earth, the sky and infinity\u201d (Ren\u00e8 Char). Oscar Piattella belongs to this last species. His art reveals itself in the relationship it establishes with the different elements, excluding none. In his works everything questions and falls silent, meditates and glimmers through. When you believe yourself suspended in the sky, the back of your hand is enough to make you reconsider. The contact is geological. Beneath a light-repelling surface swept by the wind lies a rough and dense matter, viscous as pitch. But if you think you have become acquainted with the subterranean tars of primordial matter, you are soon disillusioned, because his creation reproduces and propagates itself along the deserted horizontals of beauty.<\/p>\n Ugo Amati<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n \u2026 The theme of the exhibition is: \u201cI muri\u201d. These are singular works arising from an exploration, from a stratification of continually reinvented memories. Almost like a traveller of centuries past, Oscar Piattella, through a personal \u201cGrand Tour\u201d, has gathered the most evocative images of walls \u2014 Badia di Fiesole, Tempio di Gabi (Rome), Palazzo Ducale di Urbino, Villa di Domiziano at Sabaudia, etc. \u2014 which he has, as it were, reconstructed at full scale. But this is no facile model-making, because in recreating these structures plastically, the artist has achieved results that go far beyond simple reproduction. Imitation, in fact, is never an end in itself; it is always the pretext for moving beyond a dimension of reality.<\/p>\n Luigi Lambertini<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u2026 A \u201cthird eye\u201d, Piattella\u2019s, possessing the tactile sense, within visual apprehension, of a material appropriation of the signs of time translated into the \u201cprimordial geometry\u201d of space, perhaps in order to find a \u201cdwelling place of immortality\u201d within the masonry work\u2026 But perhaps, more than the work in itself, aesthetically accessible, what interests the artist from Pesaro is the work\u2019s \u201cfor itself\u201d in the process of becoming, as a \u201crelic\u201d of his own \u201cbeing-there\u201d in the act of making. Thus \u201ctime changes into space\u201d, as Gu\u00e9non suggests; while, in parallel, the path of the \u201csign-maker\u201d Oscar Piattella transforms the space of the place back into the time of ritual, as an infinite metamorphosis in the retrieval of images forever undergoing circular transformation, from time to space and from space to time, within the magical suspension of an anamnesis relived by committing to memory the matter of its own passage through space and time.<\/p>\n Miklos N. Varga<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n \u2026 And indeed it is here that Piattella, investigator of Gubbio\u2019s masonry surfaces through the eye of the camera, successfully carries out the operation of translating pictorially, onto panels of unusual dimensions, both the masonry facing of S. Maria di Collemaggio in L\u2019Aquila (on another occasion he experiments with graphic-material variations on the theme of the \u201cmazzocchio\u201d, already investigated perspectivally by Paolo Uccello) and the facies of Roman pavement tessellations, as well as, through a reconnaissance into the mineral and vegetal world from which he gathers various materials to mix with his colours, walls corroded by time. He thus traces a clear path to be reconstructed, abstracting from a reality that preserves their memory but not their civil climate the inventions of man designed to place between himself and others the barrier of a screen, more or less solid, rough or ennobled by ornamental motifs, in order to preserve his need for solitude and intimacy\u2026<\/p>\n Carlo Melloni<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n \u2026 For thirty years Oscar Piattella (Pesaro 1932) has pursued his research with extreme rigour, conceding nothing to the moods of the season. \u201cIsolated\u201d among the Umbrian-Marche mountains, in Cantiano, yet highly attentive to the evolution of contemporary art, Piattella marks the subtle changes in his work only after long reflection. The paintings all originate in Oscar Piattella\u2019s fascination with walls, noble and humble alike, which, with an intense sense of history and painstaking patience, he photographs in Italy and abroad: from the early Informel representations, through the white conceptual geometrisations and the alchemical presence of gold or the scorching of material, we arrive at the latest works, dominated by blue. Thus the symbolism of the wall and the taste for manual elaboration are enhanced by a colour rich in references to concrete and dreamed realities and, above all, capable of producing a sense of infinity\u2026<\/p>\n Giorgio Bonomi<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Again in 1978, Metamorfosi infinita: \u201ca great panel of time, space, life, my work, where every gust of wind lifts a layer of dust and reveals more ancient signs, yet always ready to distil liquid memories\u201d. \u201cA panel expandable to infinity, where the perimeter is merely the act of giving oneself a rule, of establishing the terms of language: \u2026 a boundary so that everything may once again be called into question, so that there may still be something to say, so as to expand, and expand again, in time, in space, in life, retracing this infinity, the infinity of man, space, time\u201d. At this point, also thanks to the code the artist himself lucidly offers us, there can be no misunderstanding of his deliberate focus on the remains of ancient historic palaces as well as on more humble urban and rural masonry surfaces: places where there is indeed a dialogue with yesterday and its immediate connection with today, and also, unquestionably, an intention of systematic investigation, from which there emerged, among other things, in 1982, a magnificent book on Gubbio, produced collaboratively but entirely marked by Piattella\u2019s \u201cpoetics\u201d\u2026<\/p>\n Luciano Caramel<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u2026 Sitting on the sofa, I listen to Piattella recount his story, beginning with Paris, with the corroded, gutted walls of Paris, with mixtures of earth and glue on canvas. Since he is the one guiding the conversation, I have time to wonder how many times he has told this story, to whom, and why. He speaks while questioning me. I ask him about Pesaro, the city of his birth; the city of his youth takes on the faces of two artists. \u201cSandro Gallucci possessed great moral certainty, an aristocratic sensitivity towards things; he rendered the atmosphere around objects, interpreted still life as portrait, was open to the young, was a master; Nanni Valentini: everyone expected at any moment that he would emerge, he possessed enormous creative potential: he was the friend with whom I shared the studio, but death broke, interrupted\u2026\u201d A moment of intense emotion suspends the regular beat of time\u2026<\/p>\n Silvia Sassi Cuppini<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n \u2026 Matter, in fact, seems privileged only in order to exalt colour: hence this magical dialogue between gold and black in the pieces called \u201cicone\u201d. Should one not perhaps prefer those variations of blue and black on which Oscar Piattella has worked so extensively? Blue and black. Azure and night. Dark needles dart like flashes piercing the sky (Piccolo progetto). Irregular contours generate a lunar geography (Inverno). Piattella has expressed himself through the search for an \u201cidea of colour\u201d which he imagines ideally detached from \u201cturquoise, ultramarine, lapis lazuli, sky blue, indigo, cobalt\u201d. Thus Piattella moves away from every form of figuration. He wants colour to exist as such. Better still: he eludes it \u2014 as witness his white walls, shroud-walls whose surfaces must be scrutinised to reveal accidents and crumbling. A place of solitude, of contemplation. A mental place\u2026<\/p>\n Martine Arnault<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u2026 The plane is organised through grid structures, with interlocks recalling the pattern of masonry, from which they clearly derive: there is therefore an offset between the regular and uniform horizontal bands and, when read from top to bottom, the zigzagging progression of the sequence of 140 rectangles, which gives dynamism to the image. Within the individual units, this is further enlivened by the jagged edges of the burnt margins, which at times allow the lighter background to show through, producing effects of fragmented luminescence. To the point of recalling certain earlier solutions in which a system of serial, geometrically uniform chromatic zones was ignited at the points where narrow, multicoloured lines met, almost alluding to an underlying natural world, phenomenally varied, entering into a dialectical relationship with the artificiality of the analytical organisation of form. The stimulus, certainly, was the same \u2014 emotional participation, imagination, the senses \u2014 that now leads Piattella manifestly to transform backgrounds into skies, shifting from a mental notion towards the embodied sensation of being rooted in the phenomenon.<\/p>\n Luciano Caramel<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u2026 There is sorcery in this former chemist. It is indeed impossible to uncover the artist\u2019s technique as he inlays, with diabolical precision, small and large rectangular surfaces of canvas into his works, perhaps painted but more likely burnt by fire or acids. They emanate a pleasant impression of iridescence. But small-format works executed white on white (using a similar process), with infinitesimal reliefs, capture the gaze even more strongly\u2026<\/p>\n Marc H\u00e8riss\u00e8<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cHow can one fail to see that nature has a sense of depth? And how can one escape the dialectic of this ambiguous coquetry which, in so many organised beings, shows and conceals in such a way that organisation lives according to a rhythm of concealment and display?\u201d (Bachelard) Everything is openness and landscape in the works of Oscar Piattella; even the canvas itself might extend infinitely. His compositions attain a higher unity. As in walls, every stone links the part to the whole. In his latest works, light spreads through a broader \u201cweave\u201d. Only a few compositional lines remain, tracing the musical score of colour and giving rhythm to its undulations. There Oscar Piattella imposes a degree of contemplation in which colour becomes full and pure sensibility: \u201cColour is sensibility become matter, matter in its primordial state\u201d (Klein) \u2026<\/p>\n Virginie Gimaray<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n A mixture of architectural rigour and colour, Oscar Piattella leads us into a world of sensibility where everything reveals itself through time. The numerous pieces of dark fabric composing his most recent works are arranged with a certain rigidity, yet allow colours, often vivid, to show through, as though to give his works a balance, a kind of self-regulation. Beyond these small, skilfully arranged units, Oscar Piattella distils other elements over these expertly cut fragments of fabric, bringing before the eye the freedom of action on which the artist thrives. Treating matter as a sign, a reality, Oscar Piattella, caught between the coldness of old walls and an entirely Latin ardour of vivid colours and heightened sensibility, provokes through his works a search for balance and wisdom that affords the eye an undisguised pleasure\u2026<\/p>\n
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