‘I feel like a tireless traveller in every part of the known and unknown world' he stated with a note of poesy: 'an exploration pushing me to find a sort of psychic life through objectivity'.

 

Actually his old and new work develops from a sort of stratification in which denseblankets of colour -- pale pinks, lavender violets, sage greens, golden yellows, cotton whites, scarlet reds -- alternate with material elements of delicate, impalpable consistency, transparent nuances and gilded backgrounds, almost as if to restore meaning to an empirical route with strong psychic connotations and which lives on and is regenerated by the depths of memory.

 

When he paints or draws, Dall'Olio merely raises barriers against the infinite. He throws images into infinity like stones in a well, hoping to fill it; he cuts, divides and overlaps surfaces, dreaming of restraining it and, if he is forced to face it, he mirrors it in the small circle of the moon or in the triangle f roofs or the rectangle of windows and doors, like the light arabesque with which, in the Far East, El Chinos au Coeur limpid et fin coaxed stars, trees, flowers and fishes onto paper. But the artist is well aware that he could never paint without the contagion of infinity. He needs the sensations, intuitions, thoughts and associations that arise in him from a source as far away as the most remote Galaxy.

 

'The visionary dream can only be created on the journey'.

 

I do not know of a better definition than this of Brogues for understanding Dall'Olio's figurative skill to the full. He is a tireless traveller: he crosses plains, hills, seas, islands and forests: he crosses historical epochs and artistic epochs: he returns unseated to read Heraclitus and the Tao-Te-Ching. During these limitless adventures all sorts of clippings, images and memories remain attached to his clothes and his saddlebags, in his gold prospector's panniers. The artist uses all these to create his works, now reproducing them, now rejecting them, now changing them. He dips his paintbrush into the vast basin of his expressive Koind, with that 'rainbow tongue' draws an ancient Emperor leafing through the useless maps in his atlas, the reflection of pearls on the Malabar sea bed, the caged bird happily escaping to fly free in the heavens.

​

The works of Dall'Olio are a veritable poetic metamorphosis. If Borges's dream kills space and time, our artist's one lapse into vertigo: innumerable times and places -- Zoroaster and Heraclitus; Amon-Ra and Osiris; Quetzalcoatl, the 'Plumed Serpent' and Montezuma; the Alhambra in Granada and Chartres Cathedral; Uxmal in Mexico and the Tempie of Lingaraja in India; Carpaccio and Klee; Bruegel and Chagall -- are merged, mixed, overlapped in a vortex in an instant of time, while all around they change shape, grow and shrink, whirl around invisible walls. Except that, as we reawaken, we discover that there is not only a metamorphosis of the dream, a memory of reveries with open eyes, like that of the Thousand and One Nights, but also a metamorphosis of the id which opens unexpected doors where, to get somewhere, we must turn our backs on it; where we must run to stay where we already are; where we must have already gone past somewhere to get to it; and time runs backwards: first the future, then the present and finally the past.

​

Floriano De Santi