Some events of the recent past, apparently unrelated to each other (the pandemic and the cases from George Floyd onwards at the basis of the Black Lives Matter movement) have led to a sort of reflection on one of their common elements: the presence/absence of the act of breathing. This function, innate, instinctive and at the basis of existence in life, has clearly been highlighted both when this has been knowingly prevented by a third party, as in the case of murders by the police, and when this has been the expression of destructive power on a global scale of a disease which drew its devastating force precisely from the deprivation of the respiratory capacity of individuals. The exhibition by Aiello and Atelier Insense (aka Adriano Rosso) arises from the symbolic juxtaposition of the two respiratory states: the presence and absence of breathing as a condition of life. On the one hand (Atelier Insense) the explicit, violent declaration of an imposed and suffered violence of the breath that fails, on the other (Sergio Aiello) the perception of veiled atmospheres, which although not included in the figurative in the strict sense, bring to certain concepts typical of certain oriental art, where the unsaid is present and protagonist and governs the work as a whole, by virtue of its implicit but essential presence. The exhibited works, born from the independent paths of the two artists, enhance this form of dualism, essentially the life/non-life boundary line, regardless of the causes that generated it, highlighting its more universal meaning and deliberately presented in the exhibition in an opposing form not to divide but to underline the uniqueness of the whole through its component parts. The message launched by the exhibition lies in the recovery of awareness of the fundamental importance of the survival instinct, manifest as in the work of Atelier Insense or latent under trace with the works of Sergio Aiello. In the last two years many individual and collective behaviors have been instinctively or forcibly modified by contingent situations, some scales of priorities, if not of values, have been revised and corrected but, despite this, there is a real risk that this unwanted path risks be obliterated in the short term by the poor capacity for historical memory that afflicts us all. This dynamic also includes the awareness of the fact that I cannot breathe and that I am alive because I breathe Who, how, what, when, where will this borderline be crossed again? How are we going to realize that we are getting perilously close to it? What will be the strategies we will adopt to return to safety conditions or will we be defenseless at the condition that I can't breathe?
Daniele D’Antonio, 2021
Synthesis and decomposition into essential elements can be found in the canvases of Sergio Aiello, whose research focuses on the abstraction of the landscape. The "So_close_So_far" project includes "Tempo presente", a monochrome visual reflection in the more "white plus white" on spatial and temporal dimensions contemporary, always parallel, indefinite and very current. With Complementary Landscapes the artist makes the endless horizon perceptible, doubling the perspective at the extremes of the space-canvas. It is a change of vision that allows you to be aware of infinity, without however giving certainties about it: what you see, in fact, is not always it is fully understood. The infinite, therefore, a concept that remains inexplicable in its entirety, becomes an interesting means of confirming our finiteness.
Nadine Bajek
Usually when I am writing a critical text I am always surrounded by books, magazines and anything else that could creatively influence my writing. When Sergio asked me to write for him this did not happen. The reason is one. His work attracts me. I'm passionate. Like his person, his painting is overwhelming, it's real. It is not the usual "fuffa" ( gas.. ) but "solid reality". Someone defines him a landscape artist for me is a poet. In this case, he reminds me of Ungaretti. Sibylline but exhaustive. Bare and at the same time redundant. Beyond the technical gesture (superfine and masterful) beyond the "pleaser" colors (for me aphrodisiacs) his works are a "I enlighten of immense". In their pictorial minimalism there is a world to discover. A world that reminds me of childhood in Forlì. A territorial universe, that one, made of rocky coast. The calcareous white that makes love with the blue sky in August. In his paintings I immerse myself without taking breath because to die in it would be a beautiful death. In a look at the sky I could breathe the immortality that we all want and an artist even more. Sergio's paintings beyond the spatula strokes, the overlapping material, beyond any atavistic memory make you feel good. To live one of his paintings you have to touch it and then sniff it and then to close with a flourish you could lean on one ear and listen to the jabber of his land or the voice that maternally invites you to feel comfortable. Enlightenment of infinity is not impossible. It is enough to believe in it and have the good fortune to meet the one who has been given a gift: to make you live emotions that today we risk not knowing how to live anymore.
Claudio Lorenzoni
"ABOUT LANDSCAPE-PAINTING"
We have lost a lot of time discussing the actual contemporaneousness of painting: is it still "licit", in the tradition, or is it anachronistic?
What pushes an artist in this glimpse of the third millennium to express himself (still) with painting and, rarer, with landscape painting, is one
of the many phenomena that crowd the contemporary art world, which manages without difficulty spacing from the deepest glow of a "white cube" - that
presents itself as an artistic object or exhibition space does not matter, always with ice remains - up to the painting and duly framed to hang in
what once called the living room. Sergio Aiello is now an expert painter, behind that school, messy was called a century ago, who not only teached
the essential bases for being able to exercise a "job" ... "While painting a picture, at the same time it is destroyed," said Giovanni Frangi ,
on which impulse I approached Sergio Aiello when I first saw his landscapes - not thinking about Turner, that he confides me to be his ideal, but
Turner melted colors them ("utque erat et tellus illic et pontus et aer "sang Ovidio), Aiello overlaps them: it's the difference between a sauce and
a dish, Turner is an exquisite menu made up only of sauces, superbly unreal, impossible, a marvelous exception that was able to invent only him -
because it does not flaunt the mere documentary data, and in the image that creates can transmit a sense of distance and loss. His paintings thus
become pure desires for the horizon, "possible encampments within the infinite" (Luigi Meneghelli). In the last works, presented in this exhibition,
we are faced with landscapes that, despite the artist programmatically taking the moves from reality, avoid the descriptive reproduction of nature.
With a chromatic rhythm marked by blues, burnt and worn lands, traces of burning reds among dusty coals, there are the views of the seascapes, often
innervated by transversal drippings of virginal enamels. Earth and water touch and collide, embrace and intertwine. Real space and imaginings follow
canvas after canvas without cracks, dissolving in the space the realistic details in homogeneous areas of color. Aiello acts in a synthetic way isolating by menas colors the subjects
from the context (the subject seems in fact to have become, at the limit of relevance, conceptually fluid and lacking carrier of interest just for its possible
manipulative potential), while the drawing, the "form mentis" who designed the scene, only acts to define the lines of force in which the main elements
of the composition are unrolled. He proceeds by synthesis, by concentration, layer by layer, thickening to the core, mixing at the margins, diluting to
the borders, seeking dissolution, chasing the soul of the figure (of a pedestrian imitation) just disappeared in the horizon, sublimated in the name of a
broader perspective in which she flew to take refuge after being pushed out of the scene. The spots of color draw its landscape, mixed,
overlaid, scratched: dense spreading material on a different, extraneous, dazzling and intimidating canvas that embodies the stylistic outcomes of the
artist, bringing the pictorial grammar to the extreme. The painting thus remains in a stage where the image, still recognizable, is irreparably transformed,
even flawed, into a personal and lyrical vision, with the intention of showing a luminous sensation, a formal allusion. On the canvas re-emerges the
atmosphere of a real landscape that, in the viewer, penetrates and resonates deeply and in which one can plunge more vigorously and rediscover that same
reality from which the painter seemed to have removed it. In the elimination of details, in the almost total absence of description and narration, the
exhibition thus seems to indicate the tendency towards a total autonomy of Aiello's research, parallel and therefore detached from that continual flow of
images that is reality. To the mimetic copy or to its figurative reinterpretation, the artist contrasts a gestural force able to lead him towards a total
independence of (his) painting from any outlook of the world, seen or pre-existent. It is precisely here that it is right to exist as a painter and as a
landscape painter even on the threshold of the third millennium, in the full and almost total globalizing dominance of Contemporary Art.
Gianfranco Schialvino