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<<|| [12.08.11] Ono Emiliani: from Vocabolair [w/remarks by Luca Arnaudo] ||>> |
We can begin like this: with the possibility that everything is united, the challenge being, then, to understand the nexus. |
 Glosso (2011)
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Far away to us, in terms of sensitivity and experience, the possibility of understanding religiously such unity, it happens nevertheless to experiment at times the vision of it through art, as an image of lightning in transit. The next thought, when reason tries to tidy up the impressions lying as ashes after a fire, is that there are hidden, latent structures, to which real artworks participate by giving them a perceptible form. Forms are different, with different textures—sculpture, music, painting, literature—but always necessary. From a critical point of view, what matter here is the development, how the shape has been shaped, how a work has established its presence in the world (through this, at least temporarily, witnessing also the one of his creator). Curiously, rather than art criticism it is grammar, in particular the generative one, which can provide some interesting ideas in this regard. |
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In fact, the syntax, studying the relations of the order and form of linguistic elements, seems to have discovered some kind of "regularities" between languages: it has been inferred, then, that the constituent elements of a grammar, its rules and representations, are developed according to a few innate principles of cognitive-psychological origin, thus generating the whole language. Now, this inside look to a creative expression comes in handy for considering the paintings of Ono Emiliani, as, since the inception of his research, the artist is focused on the generation of images that have a consistency, both in themselves and in relationship with all others as well, according to very few principles of development.
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The constant use of monochrome backgrounds is the trick used by the artist to focus on the relationships between shapes developing in a well-defined plane, shapes that participate in a process which, having eliminated the background noise, continue uninterrupted. Such development operates independently from the signs used as a reference, confirming the generative primer of Emiliani's work. If we scroll through the production of the artist, in fact, it is possible to verify a complex succession of series of paintings, each time focusing on different signs but always resolved in their settled development: the "Games", the "Ripraps", the "Matrixes", the "Findings", the "Mats" are episodes of a single story, of which the "Glosses" and the poetic “Haiku Seeds” of Rieti's exhibition represent the most recent result. |
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Visual references of these new works belong to a tradition of extraordinary complexity and continuity, the Sumerian cuneiform tablets (IV century BC) and the rhythmic compositions of Henri Michaux (XX century AC) being its declared poles: they are poles, we may note, between which lies ample space for additional inclusions. The mountains, for example. |
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We know, two thousand five hundred years are nearly nothing compared to the passing of geological time: however, technically speaking, they can already be an age, namely a period of rock formation compared to the same plane. By keeping a plane still, we can think then of tracking the movement of a material, like rock, a whole movement to which an age, through all its various phenomena, belongs. Well, we believe this is what art makes too, though limited in its creative and temporal relation to nature, faithful to its ability to understand and make visible the internal unity of the things said earlier. |
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In the case of Emiliani, painting is the means, made personally necessary by his insight and experience, devoted for such an undertaking: to record the signs of movement, at the same time continuing it in a union between art and nature that does not force them, but finds the right form to express both. It speaks, then, about all this to men in a gloss, a prodigious language with images as light, aerial vocabularies of a pure visual intelligence. |
Emiliani Ono, born in Turin in 1966, lives in a village in the mountains nearby Cuneo, in Northern Italy. Dedicated exclusively to painting since the late 1980s, Emiliani has had numerous solo exhibitions in Italy and abroad: most recently, and of particular mention, A fine disregard, held in December 2010 at the Angevin Castle of Mola di Bari, where some paintings of Emiliani were presented together with a series of works by Alberto Burri. |
Luca Arnaudo is writer, jurist and art critic. He has written five books of short stories, travelogues and poetry, and had work in the previous issue of Sleepingfish. |
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