“I
really like Roberto’s art – it’s so honest, innocent
and direct, and the colour and form seem to just come directly from
the image itself, without all sorts of stuff being projected or brought
in from outside – it’s just like Roberto interacting with
the light – or something really basic going on between the coloured
light, his eyes, his hands and the coloured paint – but that light
is so pure and mediterranean – how can he deal with the light
and weather in Yorkshire?”
Anyway, that’s roughly the sort of thing I remember thinking,
seeing the wonderful light, and the play of colour and form in what
Roberto makes. I wish I could put it better – but really, the
painting speaks for itself much better than anything I can say. I suppose
I have a sense of the work being a kind of ‘meditation’
in front of a developing image and support (that’s what the French
call the physical frame in which the painting is made – or for
Roberto, perhaps, ‘occurs’).
I mean: I have a sense – which seems like a kind of ‘infection’
by the painting – that there’s this surface, and Roberto’s
(or not even Roberto’s, in a way) strange Sicilian eyes, and the
pigments and a brush or palette-knife or something, and hands, and of
something then just happening – a sort of interaction (and, in
Otley, not with the world and light immediately outside, because I think
Roberto actually works physically cut off from ‘the world’
outside on the Leeds Road – but with a pure clear mediterranean
light that’s always there for him, and somewhere for me). An interaction
that Roberto just lets happen, so that everything happens, and ends
up, on the coloured surface or surfaces, and the colour and form ‘speaks
for itself’, without anything being brought in from somewhere
else to confuse that simple self-expression – or ‘play’
- of light and colour.
So, in the end, it’s that force of light, left so purely to express
itself, that really hits me whenever I see the work and am overpowered
and calmed by it. I could go on and on trying to express this better,
but I guess I’ve already said far too much, but not nearly enough.
The bottom line is, I suppose, precisely that the paintings –
unlike so vcery much that goes by that name, really do ‘speak
for themselves’, because Roberto has discovered how to let them,
without bits of his ego trying to take them over or claim them, or speak
for them.
I
was really struck by this dramatic dimension in the ‘Beautiful
Day’ and how it works as a ‘play’ of colour and
form in the dramatic sense. Bit like a sort of abstract – or maybe
I mean concrete – ‘cinema’, a kinematics of colour
and form, rather than of ‘things’ (whatever they are). As
though each element in the series is, say, one ‘side’ looking
forward, another looking back, in a series of steps through a cycle
of creation.
I
can’t help wondering what would happen if Roberto took the whole
series and, with his computer, ‘morphed’ it into a sort
of ‘evolving’ image on the screen. Actually, ‘screen’
and ‘slice’ seem in some ways better words for the two-sided
elements than ‘surface’.
There
is, again, so much more to say, and it’s all of course redundant,
really – noise which detracts and distracts from the silent ‘cinema’
of the painting(s). But the fact that I feel drawn irresistibly into
these attempts at narrative whenever I try to ‘say something’
in response to the images, for me just underlines again their dramatic
force – and their ‘truth’ (which is probably the best
one-word description of the work as a whole).
I
can’t help thinking of Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Nude descending
a staircase’, and vague memories of those Italian ‘futurists’
(Boccione? Balla?) who tried to bring time into Cubism. Again, it’s
mostly a ‘distraction’ and indeed a waste of time to think
too much this way (my pathology) – but since I was thinking anyway,
I couldn’t help coming back to that analogy from almost exactly
a century ago – building up compositions, almost musically, from
different ‘slices’ in space and time through the ‘same
thing’. One of the great um, things, for me, in Roberto’s
work, is that the ‘things’ that arrest a cubist construction
at one particular point in the space and time of things, seem to dissolve
in Roberto’s series into, well, that ‘play of light’.
Do
you know how people often represent a film - another good word, perhaps
- on the Net by a sequence of ‘screenshots’ or ‘screens’?
Couldn’t help think of that either, when I saw the Beautiful
Day sequence on the website.
Bravo!
Martin
Joughin