I have to praise a great friend, a great painter, whom I met back in the eighties, introduced by Tommaso Trini in Milan, where he had long since moved from his native Catania, the city where I was living at the time. Milan was his right place, one that could nurture his almost priesthood, far more than a vocation, for painting understood as an explanation of a high sense of colour, of dissolving, of fragmentation. His was an experimentation on the identical, called upon to resolve the infinite possibilities of nuances of the signifier, as a theatre of visibility, therefore of being and appearing. A perseverance never tainted by the many contemporary demands to try “something else”, because for him the mystery of colour remained central: a colour that does not exist in reality, but is created in the mind. The same concept that had led Leonardo, the supreme creator of all materiality, to state that painting is a mental thing – a thought that seems tailor-made for Pino Pinelli. His chromaticity is always dense and full, endowed with an intrinsic imaginary force, which does not yield to modulating difficulties and retains an elusive lightness. He called it "painting painting," with a reinforcing, non-minimalist sense, never disdainful of feelings, emotions, fascinations, always resolved on the plane of tactility and sculptural plasticity, in which the sense of relief becomes a totalitarian spatial evocation, capable of enveloping the viewer and leading them into a poetic rapture of pure visibility.
I've always wondered if his approach was analytical or synthetic in verifying the quality of colours and form, in the way they blended together, precisely at the moment they were “etched” into an architectural dissemination, sometimes geometric, sometimes baroque, but always spectacular. Yes, because he never abandons the ridge between contemplation and emotion, surprising both and making their rarefied meaning an attraction of wonder and suasion. His own, intrinsic qualities were accentuated by the proximity of Mario Nigro, Enrico Castellani, Agostino Bonalumi, and Turi Simeti, with whom he shared a series of fluidities characterised by the strength of minimalism, by not conceding anything to decorativism. And this is certainly an important legacy of the twentieth century, more involved in the creative, non-dogmatic, and non-repetitive interpretation of the avant-garde, without ostentation or force, evoking a silence that, as far as I am concerned, still accompanies me. Every time I look at the two pieces he left me which I keep in my Roman and Palermitan homes, I feel a special sense of companionship in my gaze, which induces reverie, with my eyes wide open, allowing myself to be illuminated by the special spirit he infused into them: light.
KLESSIDRA | EDITED BY FRANCESCO GALLO MAZZEO
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