“ROOTS”,
acrylics
on deep edge canvas, cm. 100x150 - 2020
I
interpreted the roots as the origins of identity. The allegory that I
have staged in this painting is a metaphor of the origins of a man,
myself, an involuntary paradigm of the seasons of life.
The
suggestions are linked to the stereotype of a family tree, but also
to a lost Eden and to hope in future generations.
The
great tree of life has its roots in the golden age where a primitive
choreography is represented that stages the ancestors.
Overlapping
vintage photos from the late nineteenth century, the portrait of the
maternal grandmother Emma, the group photo of the
great-great-grandparents who emigrated to America and who seem
pioneers of the Far West. In this latest family photo, the older boy
on the left is also the man advancing in black and white and
dominating the center of the composition. He is my grandfather, a
construction developer in Somalia, bathed in the blinding light of
Africa.
From
the roots to the trunk, the allegory uses fantasy images that
describe the seasons of love, with passion, illusions, precarious
certainties and indestructible vulnerabilities.
From the trunk
to the crown of the tree, from which the children hang like fruit:
light airy and full of hope like the cherubs in the frescoes of
Venetian villas. Dreams, projects and fantasies take flight like
acrobats circling against the sky in the upper left.
The
landscape, in the warm light of a late afternoon, is a hill with
olive trees, a metaphor for an Eden imagined to reassure the spirit.
This
metaphor constructs the unitary meaning, although Chaos is the true
family tree of an existence. Everyone is inevitably at the mercy of
Chaos or chance, but the latter is often wiser than each of us, who
instead delude ourselves that we are children of the Apollonian
spirit.
