Advanced Expansions
A reflection on the origin of Filo 35 years ago takes me back to the highly politicized artistic climate of the ‘70s in which Conceptual Art offered the fertile ground for the so-called dematerialization of the art object.
At the time I was an art and painting student at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and my first contact with the New York art scene made me soon realize how hard and unfruitful the road of painting would have been in a situation populated by semi-empty galleries characterized by a kind of art that would later be ironically defined as “push pin art”.
But painting did not want to abandon me altogether.
I was intimately, emotionally and culturally involved with it, and my Florentine origins did not allow me to definitively leave it behind. Using acrylic paint I understood that colour had lost the mystic aura of its interpenetration with the surface and had become lay, secular, dilutable with water and, once dried, it revealed its plastic and malleable essence. Thus acrylic colour turned into matter and therefore object, and it broke apart from its mother canvas-surface, encompassing its constitutive and archetypal element: the Filo (thread).
Its peculiar identity made of primary colours tied it to 20th century Modern Art history (and to childish play), and its minimalist and three-dimensional essence allowed it, in the years bridging the 70s and 80s, to embark on a voyage into the vast Post-Modern territories, undertaking its own story and mingling with the various realities proposed from time to time by its companion and alter ego.
Filo is never painted but always made, created in the infinite sequencing of unique morphological moments and forms that give origin to a qualitative and quantitative growth aimed towards infinity.
The Filo form rises from the deconstruction of the canvas and the extrusion of colour-matter from the orifice of the paint tube. From this indissoluble pair a new episode of the eternal subject-object dialogue springs out, a sort of lay epiphany that unravels in space and time. Filo becomes the medium through which colour transforms itself into an object of the world and allows the maker to know and experience the world itself and his personal relationship with reality in the eternal play of life.
All this through the pleasure of a continous discovery of the form and of the possibility for creating a “loving bridge” with the others.
Since 1981 the Artist in Presence Projects have been conceived with the intention of establishing a sort of bridging process with the viewer.
Ultimately the Filo wants to reach a 0 degree in the relationship between the artist and the user. Its purpose is to give birth to an atmosphere of magic and playful parthenogenesis, “virginal” in its intentions and therefore detached from the economic sphere. If the encounter is positive, a vital lymph feeding the roots of memory will be drawn out, generating pure and profound energy.
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