“Genius is wisdom and youth”

“Genius is wisdom and youth” wrote Edgar Lee Masters: a difficult balance because the error is in ambush, but the error makes no disappointment if it is a true error, a wandering along the meanders of the uncertain truth, indeed it confirms the wisdom of youth. Other is when you err by imitation, indeed you sin by imitation: but this type of error is possible, frequent in the young (an error that immediately destroys them as young people and makes them frighteningly old) you look Fabrizio Vatta, who combines artistic wisdom and moral youth, besides the age.
At the exit of the twentieth century the problem is serious: the entire century has sinned by imitation and has lost its youth. The question is how and why it was what it was: because we continually played to imitate the innovation for ninety years.
Fabrizio Vatta has had two masters, at the highest level, who represent the two opposite ends of the artistic experience of the century that is dying, Emilio Vedova and Luigi Tito.
The dialectic mediation operated by Vatta seems to be an expression that enriches the ideological perspectives, a speech itself completely right: a fortunate hand, an elegant figurative capacity have allowed Fabrizio Vatta until a short time ago a realistic dimension that exceeded the image in an acute effort of psychological penetration which appears admirable in a long series of portraits.
But the influence of Vedova however strongly disguised does not allow avoidances, the restraint absolution, dialectic in truth is not, if not for historical analysis comfort: in fact, inside the single painting the image serves as context to the background more that background serves as context to the image, as shown in the figures of the Gestalt-psicologye. This reciprocity of roles is a symbolic form and does not allow further solutions: each painting is strongly dilemmatic, the role of the viewer for the authority of the painter is limited to one possible choice: or so or so, tertium non datur. The painting of Vatta as the sublunary world of Plato, hovers between being and nothingness, indeed between nothing and being, because being always remains a certain and possible landing place. Speaking of his sympathy for Francis Bacon, the cultural impact that this great painter exerts on him, Vatta professes to love “the death”, but he clarifies that he loves “the death that becomes life”, not renouncing then the positive aspect which appears clearly in the light of his
works…
Thus the existence dissolves in allusive omens as the violet jacket of “Dentro la tua anima”, or as the trace of the armchair in “Isola di silenzio”, or in the woman’s portrait of “L’indovina”. There is always in these paintings a sign, a reference, a wink to the other, to the being that there is beyond this not being that there is not.

Bruno Rosada

“Figures”

Excerpts of the universe transferred on the canvas with apparent randomness and deference, where everything flows slowly and inexorably, making a synthesis of the real that mixes wildly the pigments and the charcoal powder to stage a social anthology stolen from post-war existentialist literature; figures adrift, weaknesses and solitudes of sketched humanity , uncertain and indefinable epilogues of characters caught in the midst of stereotyped and banal actions,testify instead the creative energy pulsating despite everything, beyond the absurd sloth of motionless and repetitive existences, pictorially sketched with thrift of action and shade of colours. Taking out the tones to the colours of the world and depriving every vision of the limpid academic artifice, fused in the dense space of the vital air, the figure, starting point and arrival of this artistic experience, always emerges, central and predominant, searching for insights even when they appear to be abstract.
Figures in search of landfall, prisoner of dense psychological textures, bordering on extreme solitudes in these realistic and tragic stages in which the deconstruction of the world contributes to the construction of uncertainty, offering itself helpless to the looks, waiting for a judgment that seems inexorable to fall on faces and on bodies taunted by the light – grazing in the foreground, in close -up and standing on the long fields of the diagonals which, by contrast, bring the illogical to the concrete, eliminating the perceptive distortions.
The refined photographic cuts of the compositions confer immediate credibility and drama to these images, which nevertheless cease to refer to the fantastic and to the oneiric: colour shapes and deforms, identifies and cancels. In this fulfilling pair, drawing a trace and then hiding it, conveys the multifaceted essence of life. That is absorbing a real element, a physical suggestion and then exploding it into matter that exponentially amplifies the basic feeling, cloying every corner of the visible sphere of its essence with fluid and dynamic chromatic material, writes the theology of an occult world in becoming, where staying, to represent, represented the only antithesis to nihilism.The evident debt of Francis Bacon’s painting, so, resultes into obsession with life by virtue of which only we, human figures in an inhumane context, become the subjects of our obsessions, characters with vibrating skins, not racked in the flesh but beyond it, outside or inside, in the psyche dramas, concealed by states of apparent calm that the artist can not oppose but only ego to extremes with thick and violent color layers and with centrifugal directions. Driving to the limit the tension up to the point where the torment comes out and the urge comes close to the tragedy are so banished, spiritual allusive evanescences in accordance with the terrible and real concreteness of worlds in decline in which every vision is magmatic mixture, every microcosm fraction of the whole, every feeling as a creative force that in the pictorial poetics of Fabrizio Vatta refuses to lie unexpressed.

critical text by Gaetano Salerno
art critic and director of Segnoperenne.it

Italiano