Some artists shouldn’t paint, write poetry, or compose music.

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Some years ago three primates were closed in their cages and fed at a certain hour, and the eating time programmed when the light was turned on. A fourth monkey was given the same timetable, same surrounding, same food, but he got drawing pens, chalks and drawing paper. Some time passed and the three monkeys became used to the timetables and before the turning on of the light they stood already in front of the door, waiting for the dishes to pass the bars of the cage. The fourth monkey started drawing and fill- ing hundreds of papers, and did not respect the time- tables, eating only when hungry, and not when the light was turning on.

I didn’t read the following issues, describing the continuation of the experiment, but I thought having stimulated the creativity of the fourth monkey would have given her the desire to satisfy not only the needs of eating and drinking; The monkey became aware of her indipendence, that is anticonformism.

Creativity and art make people free and give space to the needs that are beyond the material field.

Artists are often revolutionary people because they adapt badly to the rules imposed by the others. Artists are free and sometimes would love to be free- ing for the ones who still want to try to get excited and feel sensations, passions, willingness to live with heart and with feelings.

I want to imagine Luca Dall’Olio and his art like that, thinking of when I opened one of his catalogues and met his landscapes, his stellar skies, his metaphysic

between a boy’s conscience and a man’s melancholy, who, feeling time marking out the material, tries to de- lude that with art it is possible both to change the habits and to slow down the run of Chronos, colouring in that way, the soul’s physiognomy.

Luca Dall’Olio’s images can join colour and shape with harmony; we are not talking about abstract fig urativism, but about pure will to go beyond the representation as mere production of personal stylistic device. The essential elements of Luca’s landscapes and antrophomorphic cities are two: the representative subject and the represented object. They both exist only inside the imagine created by the artist, as two different balanced entities, and a perseption of a subject without object can’t exist in the reading of Dall’Olio’s work. The object exsists because there’s a subject that considers it in the representation and similarly the subject gets a sense about itself thanks to its relationship with objects. We are talking about a philosophical aesthetic concept from Shopenauer; if ob- ject and subject are on the same level for the deutch philosopher, in the philosophical-aesthetical elabora- tion of Dall’Olio, the represented object allow to understand the subject and to depict the inspiring idea in the marvellous synthesis of shapes, lines and colours.

We can’t find Schopenauer’s and Kant’s casualness in the disposition of shapes in the paintings of this artist, because the object is the action that stops time and allouds to feel the space.

In Luca Dall’Olio’s paintings we find the concepts of noumeno and phenomenon. If the phenomenon is the product of our conscience, the world we see with the intellect’s “prior” shapes like time, space and casuality, the noumeno is the real thing, real essence and basis of the world. In Luca’s paintings the representation becomes a dream synthesis, a day illusion, a gone away reality that lives again through memories and feelings that the piece of work makes the viewer feel.

Obejects are the testimony of a passed time, and thepainting can be the real testimony of an unreal event that can’t have parameters apart from fantasy and feelings.

We can perceive reality only through dream, other- wise melancholy becomes sadness and alienation, conformism and dipendence of time, instead of being preliminary remark of creativity.

Saying that, stellar skies are not nocturnal but symbols of rebirth, as the rebirth of eve- ry star. Blue sky is the representation of passed time and the star is the goddess who permits to irradiate the past in the future, regenerating the best part of ourselves. Dall’Olio tells us that everyday is really a new day and the important thing is not what we have been but what we will be and want to be untill the end. Columns are traces of a past that

has become history, they also are the presence of gods that left a world where man preferred the dis- harmony of senses and the conform- it of feelings to the uniqueness of the soul.

In the paintings we find houses banded toghether in castles or castles that seem houses banded

toghether, there’s no human figure apart from symbols or allegorical semblances. The background is the one of the psyche, the space is the one of the Soul and the light pervades the objects and the objects define the conscience that the space is real and the light is not surreal but mystic.

The keystone that confirms and emphasize the re- flections I made untill now is in the shadows that Luca Dall’Olio paints. Shadows in fact, are not attesting the

presence of the sun, but they are conscience of the light that springs from men’s mind and heart, it’s the same brightness that radiates from the feelings and clarifies passed time for everyone, in order to better the forthcoming time.

It feels like that with the mystic shadows of Luca Dall’Olio, more than with the methaphisic ones, we can happily reach the sytnhesis between the space where Giotto put the manifestation of God for the new theology of Francesco D’Assisi, and the golden and bright universe of medioeval paintings for whom God was a bright absolute manifestation, without the pos- siblity of shadow.

The shadow, in Luca’s work, it’s not only the presence of a Spirit, nor only an evident absence of light, that meant the presence of a demon, as Buoninsegna and Cimabue expressed in their art, with an auratic dimen- sion where the negation of shadow and the presence of a golden space was understood as God emanation, from men’s point of view.

The light that pervades the pieces of work of this artist is the light shining in ourselves since our child- hood, it doesn’t need neither time, nor theories, nor to be satisfied by primary needs, it’s the light we ex- press with creativity. A creativity in the meaning of life evidence for artists, and it’s for this reason that artists can’t be into compliance with nothing and none, and it was the reason why they were considered “sovver- sive”, people to push away because they painted, wrote poetry, and composed music. Maybe it’s the same reason of the fund cutback from the current government?

Luca Dall’Olio shouldn’t paint and his equals shouldn’t paint either, nor write poetry, or compose music, because this way of making art permits the re- discovery of the light that shutters the dark and let peo- ple dream again. But what are dreams and feelings, and the connection of the heart with the mind for? In a world where the aphonic sound of senses rules?

The aesthetic philosophy of Dall’Olio let us recon- sider our time, and undress our being to the wicked- nesses of a mercantile world that give us both shining lights and empty myths.

We are now able to break conformisms with the inner and gentle strenght of emotions, and as the pri- mate of the experiment, through creativity the reason of feelings take it’s strenght and we can finally hear the scream or the song of it, and sometimes it’s unconfortable presence gives us finally the courage to defy for who wants us silent, monochrome and conventional.

Artists like Luca Dall’Olio shouldn’t make art be- cause they permit people to rediscover the vulnerability of the ones that can’t be into compliance with no chorus, no flock, more vulnerable yes, but magnificently unique and able to live life.

Luca gives us the sound of soul and the colours of memories, our best memories.

 

Alberto D’Atanasio