Artist Luca Dall'Olio has always been able to preserve enchantment for childhood intact. Although he is now a grown man and a mature artist, his ego has never fought back the pleasure to travel in ''wonderland''. The artist constructs visual narrations interacting in complicity with those who, luckily, do not want to grow up, making oil paintings and decorating them with golden, silver and lead leaves. The titles he gives to these joyful representations send the observers some ironic remarks, ambiguous images, in contrast with the questions we would like to ask about the actual relationship between these images and his dreamlike world which, we suspect, is much deeper and darker than what appears on the surface. Dall'Olio's artwork looks as though it comes from an oriental culture, where the sign is powerful and creates the image, while the color creates well-defined, anti-natural shapes with bright, contrasting shades, willingly making the landscapes and characters lacking any depth of perspective, as if he wanted to show us the pure literary nature of his work of art. This extremely curious poetic imagination creates some focal points where, usually, there is, embedded in architectural constructions, a face of a man, or a woman, looking like masks, examining the observers with their blue, attentive gaze. The effect provoked by those eyes is indeed very similar to what we see reflected in the mirror, a stupefying look, since in those eyes there is only the unuttered question we asked them, which is the sign of a lack of recognition. Dall'Olio, painter of dreams, may be included in the surrealist tradition, even though his imagination tends to enclose itself in the mystery of its global meaning, rather than expanding towards an analytical and psychological analysis. All those images are, above all, engraved moments, which my be read by anyone, where it is not always possible to follow the maze of narrative complexities of the inventions transposed on the canvas with extraordinary talent, and where, perhaps, the only mystery is the quantity of inventions which make up the whole painting. But, even if the author, not even with the title, allows us to decipher these images, he certainly wants to involve the observer with his emotions, to capture his/her interest with a mysterious imagination where, in addition to the ancient meaning of the fairy tale he tells us, there is also a subtle irony. What is most surprising in his works is the quality of the drawings, far away from rhetorical excesses thanks to a balance of the different elements of the painting, which makes us analyze the whole image made up of elements creating a coherent mental landscape. As for the power of colors and decorations in his artwork, they make the narration tantalizing, which looks as though it was made by an ancient craftsman, like those who used to decorate the stained-glass windows with bright drawings and weave the big tapestries on the walls of ancient castles. The lack of perspective of Dall'Olio's art comes from this aesthetic work; the artist is able to unveil his inner thoughts with visual effects stemming from starry skies and imaginary cities where knight-like, magic characters meet, where ancient historiated portals open on adventures which are about to come to a conclusion and unveil all mysteries.

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Vittorio Sgarbi