Statement

I started working as an illustrator and designer in 1987 when I completed my studies and dedicated myself entirely to painting only several years later. The urge came when I realised that there is a dense and tangible dimension through which all our thoughts, emotions and feelings are filtered; it is the filter that allows us to perceive reality: the dimension of drama.

I started to investigate the deepest and most hidden aspects of Man and his behaviour in everyday life in relation to this dramatic dimension, dominating existence.

At the beginning I used wooden panels, recovered on the street or in a landfill, as a support. I drew continuously the fragments of the stories I derived from my direct experience or by observing those of others from the outside on every kind of paper.

I glued the drawings on wood trying to recompose order and thus reconstruct another universal story in which everyone could find themselves and then I added the colour. The collage technique suited the narrative reconstruction of the paper fragments.

When I understood that drama appeared to me in bright and vivid colours, since it often manifests itself in a violent and blinding way, I was faced with a new difficulty. I had to manage the density of this dimension, while using colours to which we are used to giving more pleasant meanings.

I began to mess with the stroke, making it more and more essential, almost primitive and childish; then I added the dripping colour that did not just react to the force of gravity, but allowed the colours to contaminate, continuously overlapping one another.

From the beginning I concentrated on details, inserting small fragments of images, numbers, words to build micro-stories that, through the mark and colour, could better define the main theme of the work, the macro-history I wanted to represent.

Words, in particular, have always played an important role in my work, both as an integral part of the story told, to be understood as a significant element, and as one with meaning, reduced to a mark and colour. The choice to use the English language, often more synthetic and effective than Italian, answers the need to internationalise the message by emphasising the universality of the concept and making it immediately available for a larger number of people.

The growing need to compare my research with that carried out by other artists, especially in relation to painting, led me to suspend my work for a few years. I tried to theorise both the conceptual and technical aspects with the scope of redefining a path, even at an exhibition level, that could allow me to obtain greater recognition.

Art is first and foremost a visual fact, since thinking is expressed through matter and it has its own form, density, colour and even flavour. Lately, I have chosen to bring the challenge of matter to the canvas, increasing its weight with glue and the volume through the accentuation of ripples and folds on the paper. This reduces the distance between the painting’s two-dimensional level and the viewer.

The life of man is woven from intertwining big or small stories. Nothing is more interesting than something else but there are more or less interesting ways of seeing and narrating them. I start from small and seemingly insignificant details to narrate and reconstruct a story that belongs to everyone, in which everyone can recognise themselves, in an attempt to reveal those truths that the society in which we live often tries to hide.

Alberto Raiteri