Colours And Emotions In Time In Master Sandro Carloni’s Paintings
A sense of bright freshness emerges in master Sandro Carloni’s splendid pictorial art, in which the first visual contact is defined by a pleasant immersion in a natural atmosphere made up of rural landscapes and seascapes, thick woods and tree-lined old villages, blooming bushes symbolizing spring’s soft and festive colours. Everything seems to be in complete constituent harmony in the fascinating real and imaginary visions, which coincide with fragments of the memory of the artist and with his nostalgic emotions. His touch is instinctive and vibrating in the modulation of colour which builds light and shade, among plants and thick bushes barely moved by the sea breeze, among blue and clear expanses of sky, among rays of solar brightness that, on the horizon, skims the immensity of the far away sea in an aura of quiet poetic freedom. In the chromatic harmony of the polished tonalisms of his artworks, everything vibrates in the clean and instantaneous gestural expressiveness; the tonal gradations modulate themselves like melodious music in the lyric rhythm among the light and shade effects in the measured structural forms in synthesis of light. In his original textured paintings on jute canvas – distinctive technique which in the colour’s dense consistency distinguishes in a special way master Sandro Carloni’s full of character pictorial art – there is an impressionistic background in the reminiscence of Cézanne’s nineteenth-century painting, in the reconstruction of the landscape views through the imaginative power, in colour’s composition with an extraordinary fusion of a naturalistic informal style, free from any pre-established form in his authentic language. So a pictorial expression arises and it points out a gestural painting, with a personal interpretation of the concrete, in which it is of primary importance the poetics of colour in continuous evolution. Shapes, atmosphere, light during the seasons, are also changing in an inherent motility of dreamy representations in the see-through effect of the jute canvas, which reminds old ages; in a psychological interpretation, the artworks reveal feelings and sensations of the artist in the contemplation of nature. In this way everything flows, in time and light, in a nostalgic existential tale rendered with the language of colour. In landscapes full of luxuriant vegetation, like in a world of secret charm, is visible a continuous movement in the diversity of the always new brush stroke, in which the view of woods and old country villages in the softness of the tonalisms expresses a sense of dreamy reality. The warm colour full of light spreads in the pictorial vibration, rendering the representations ideal places to distort memory with subtle fascinations in a state of peaceful spirituality. The mysterious and changing face of nature, among rich shades – like the pink, the bright and musky green and the golden yellow – takes us in a dimension of complete harmony, in the colour wonder which exalts the free and informal fabric of the naturalistic compositional outcome. For this reason, master Sandro Carloni’s paintings instill vitality in a timeless space, by catching the landscape’s phenomenal impression in a timeless atmosphere with pictorial feeling which narrates the ancestral beauty of nature, in close connection with man’s existence which draws from it harmonious freedom. Master Sandro Carloni’s captivating pictorial art – in a horizon that combines imagination and rationality, poetry and dream, past and contemporaneity in the immediacy of the expert spreading of colour, among extraordinary brightness effects – tells with romantic intuition in his clearness and freshness of touch, aesthetic beauty in the mirror-like landscapes of the soul.
Blog
Carloni is a naturalist in love with landscape. His creative activity is centred on this theme, that isn’t as easy as it seems. Many painters approached this theme, and I can say that without fear of contradiction, in an oleographic or contrived way, like postcard illustrations (and I’m not interested in those ones); other painters, instead, studied the landscape “where life palpitates”. In front of us, as the artworks communicate, there isn’t a static picture, but the true sense of movement of the landscape soul. This theme has become delicate because many of us approached it: Carloni began to work in this direction, asking the greatest effort to his imagination, his culture and his intelligence, in order to offer the art’s beneficiary not just a landscape interpreted in a banal way, but a landscape in a different dimension, connected with conventional rules but at the same time beyond tradition. In light of this view of painting (let’s remember the fantasy and creativity of Mirò, Gorky and Licini from Marches; the free-form shapes, I was about to say heretical, of Klein, Burri, Vedova, De Kooning; Dorazio’s colours, the neo-realism of Gotturso, Omiccioli and Vespignani; De Chirico’s oneiric metaphysical and so on, leaving Picasso, Van Gogh, Matisse and Gauguin in peace) I look at an artwork and interpret it, to reach a critical judgment. Carloni’s artwork, a painting on jute and plywood canvas, uses a sand-like matter, picked up in a pit, that the artist kneads and then spreads on the canvas. He achieves well-chosen and very delicate chromatic combinations. During a recent conversation with the artist, he revealed me that his purpose is to obtain an absolute conciseness whose final aim must be the colours’ unification in a single colour that amalgamates them all. A goal that may seem unnatural and impossible to attain, but an attempt must be made to give things, space, and nature fundamental values. An artist with great potential that stands on a remarkable originality and creativity which interests critics that love figurative arts in a quality product, upon which is possible to reflect, by going into the reasons of art in general and of our artists in particular.
With bold mixtures of colours, Sandro Carloni ignites his artistic thrills on textured canvases produced for the occasion. The colours are vibrant, they have a life of their own, panting with jubilation and joy. Everything is appropriate: the frames themselves, made by the artist, complete the preparation of the artwork. The vibration of the work of art in its totality is the crowning touch of the polychrome concert of the painting, brimming with light and taste, where the figuration is an opportunity to live the emotion.
Relying on intuitions that range from metaphysics to an almost hallucinated and maybe oneiric story, Sandro Carloni unravels a series of exterior explorations that lead to anthological reconsiderations and to existential mediations. The bare vegetable presences dried up in a bewildered stalemate, shrouded in drifting and flickering, smoke-producing, hazy waves, thickened by indefinable tones offer the possibility to start off unexpected thematic deductions and indecipherable formal conclusions. These precise suggestions are weaved by Carloni with singular and abundant graphic competence, always with an attentive and targeted way of creating the setting with an accurate essentiality of presences. The clear dialogue opened by his works leads to those environmental and vital conclusions implied by Carloni’s intentions; in these representational manners, the painter shows a rich formal education, always aimed at resisting the easy allusive suggestions, which express his aesthetic sense by using firm and calculated canons. A peculiar form of expression, certainly not easy to pursue in his solid and magmatic research support; a figural proposal of rare aesthetic artistry and of ranging and sharp research.
Uneasiness Unveiled
Ten years have already passed since the meeting with Sandro Carloni’s artistic activity; today I notice different and deep results. At that time Carloni appeared to me in his role, seemingly humble and naïve, of the illustrator, usually and erroneously considered a service role, almost an extension in images of someone else’s text. Even then, though, he stood out for an “increasing centrality of light” that produced, by emerging from an invincible shadow of the background, an indefinite atmosphere of disquieting refinement. Up until now, Carloni showed to manage without any hesitation the most varied techniques (Indian ink, charcoal, tempera, watercolour, mixed media, etc.), but the present insisted use of oil paintings made with different materials, seems the choice that most corresponds an inner need perceived as unavoidable: almost a mental and instrumental need to succeed in expressing the most secret things still hiding deep inside himself. In conclusion, the uncertain and absorbed atmosphere, the never shouted presences despite the assiduous use of colour, the landscapes’ widespread brightness, the central emergence of an element which resists the vertigo of the impending cosmos, manage, all together, to unveil a condition of painful loneliness which isn’t individual anymore but it involves the common destiny of our contemporaneity. Especially his sea proposes itself with the ability to overcome the deserts of the soul, on which it still clusters with hopeless strength the last shrub of life. His sea, an impending mass even when it’s distant, is capable of conveying the imminence of the unrivalled mystery that reveals itself to men when they become aware of their inability to dominate it. As if we’re looking in a mirror, we can see the reflection of uncertainties and trepidation, condemnations and existential hope by whom we’re often unconsciously tormented. Carloni’s art helps us to reveal them.
Fabio Ciceroni
From the day when Sandro Carloni fixed the vision of an immediately suggestive reality – Antonio Oberti writes – the clear sky has often become cloudy or rainy. The evidence of the structure and the steadiness of the sign were no longer of any satisfaction to him. So the process of clarification came, little by litte, to make his pictorial vein impalpable. In these latest paintings the artist has always something new to offer to the vision anbd the work “evocation” becomes the most apt to dynamically express the depth, and sometimes the lightness of the polychromatic sign. Thus the gesture enhances the creative and impulsive will that, spreading little by little, trasforms itself into a romatic evidence of faitht towards nature. Flowers, bushes, trees, sea scapes and landscapes: reflections and thoughts that change into extraordinary gestual rhythms of gestures that, filling the whole surface of the canvas, disclose the aspirations of a sincere painter still able to discover something personal, and to make real his intuitions by sublimating them to memories.
Sensitive and mature, Sandro Carloni bends techniques and materials to his thinking. So we find in his subjects, so luminous and turgid and rich in tones and chromatic accents, an ideal of introspective beauty, an impressionism felt in the modern manner thatnurtures itself on thythms and refined harmonies, on continuously changing shapes and suddenflashes tranferred to the level of fantasy. A leading and sensitive thread that always knows how to sound new notes without his naturalistic dreams preventing the splendour and rich deepness of his colours to spread and kaleidoscopically to come to the surface”.