R E C E N T I O N S

 

PAINTING WORDS THAT WILL NOT PASS AWAY

Many years ago, De Gregorio’s painting was imbued with a strong sense of the nature of things, which were best understood with fastidious realism, as if peering ever farther into the secrets of a space flooded with the presence of differing lumps of thought.
The tones were dark and mysterious, with an atmosphere suited to dark refuse, bringing brief notes of colour, like invitations to discover furniture, utensils, pots made out of various materials, books, secrets of the heart and mind.
There was a clever use of grey, however - it consisted of little episodes that brought their space of action or regression into disuse, the forced coexistence with other fragments of the narrated. It wasn’t about life passed on to us from the attics – a theme very dear to Guido Gozzano.
In De Gregorio lurked the need to clarify the infinite meaning of life that is portrayed in the wings of a butterfly, in the order of a starry sky, in the beauty of life in the seasons and especially in love. Without that it would be difficult to grasp the meaning of the eternal. Without this we are nomads wandering in the desert of reason. Then more open colours arrived, visions free from congestion, issues of commitment, interpreted as a strong and persuasive motives to re-find in life a wonderful adventure that often has to tackle painful trials, but with the certainty of not being alone and the promise of infinite joy and as simple as the truth.
The artist takes steps along the Life-Truth way and is converted. Indeed this same word “conversion” (biblical and evangelical) leads to a clarification that his gift of art is nothing but a gift that is committed to service, to a mission. De Gregorio wants to bring to art, with height of his devout feeling, "words that do not pass away", the good news. He chooses to promote providential wisdom which is not the privileged possession of any human mind and does not permit discrimination. Rather he intends it for whatever childlike heart that will drink in the promises of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. The user, rather the man of faith and hope, finding himself before the work entitled "The Door” will understand the sense of the divine knocking of Jesus for human salvation. This same Jesus will not wait to be called but will come and if the door is opened will share a meal with the guest, in the joys of life (large or small) and in the sorrows of life (bearable or unbearable). This artist who evangelizes, proposes faith and brings comfort and in "Ezekiel 36" clarifies, with images, that without God there is neither salvation nor the strength to keep His Law: only when the power of His Spirit enters the repentant man, does He donate a new spirit, a new heart of flesh that allows one to walk according to His laws and to glorify Him. We are dealing with an artist who would like to thank the Lord for having dissolved the mists of his questioning and knocked down the doors of ivory which human reason could not get through.
This is a very significant selection of art and life, especially when you consider that the message reaches into a spiritual desert, into the apparent triumph of economic dominance, into the extreme consumerist game that militates against the weak and into the hunger, thirst, poverty that are exacerbated by ignorant fanaticism and superstition.
These are propositions that have substantial content value and are pleasing; that restore dignity to man in giving hope, a peace that is truly new, to clarify the right to life in a higher sense than purely social. Certainly these are good messages which demand attention and respect for the Law (of God), based on the knowledge that "many are called and few are chosen." This is the sense of De Gregorio’s art; it bears evidence to hope and to love in complete adherence to the Word, that Word which he humbly tries to assign pictorial imagery.

 

The Theological tensions in Carlo De Gregorio.
The poetic Carlo Di Gregorio is attentive in the relations between chromatic values and  more over to the concomitance of the expressive means with philosophic culture and aesthetics, the intimate relation which has been grasped in his work.
At the beginning the correlation was motivated by the prevalence of a super- objective, which called for an exhibition, thanks also to the luminous colour, in which the impressive tones configure with the images ; and gives a cognitive and mimetic purpose.
For the fact that the relation held with the artistic culture is especially marked with the process of European  impressionism , has primed the thoughts of De Gregorio the necessity to exceed the previous episode, to take the opportunity to abandon the rhetoric objectiveness and to reconstruct a reality through his own moral state, perturbed and deeply moved.
Therefore in this way the artist, after silencing the relationship that is tied between the image of a reality imitated, that has been found in a work that goes against the norm that meets with form, with the result that brings forth in fragments the reality of things which with the underlying push of the interior lacerations.
From here the journey towards the hyper- subjectiveness, for the chromatic stamp, no longer does it illustrate things but it brings about discordantly and bursts forth through a yell from the depths of the soul, disarranging the images and reducing their coincidentia oppositorum.  In fact, on the road to the dualistic moments, the artist tends to move frenetically the strokes  to make the colour vibrant- the tone is more than bright- a comprehension between the interaction of the enraged and disordered interior universe and the silence, better  described as the break-off from who lulls  indifferently when faced with a time of crisis; above all when it’s a crisis is within the conscience.
Consequently the new visio mundi  of  De Gregorio, while to one part it presents  a language that has imposed on the missed tones of a painful subjectivity,  maybe almost an exclusive hit of myself, from the other side, it attempts to directly bring a gleaming  message to the addressee who is beside  himself, (and also out with  the canvas) and who transitively wants to be involved in the justification. It deals with, as you can see, a communication above the lines, or better still dealing with art as a sign that takes a figurative prescription, it confirms that a work of art is not alien when dealing with different relationships between passion and reasoning, between ordinary feelings that are subject and historic events,  not to mention daily events. Only like this can duality be conserved in unity between the passed and present, between an identity that rises from a distance and from the deep and the living development, from the present that is showing signs of the future.
The reality is that we are observing in the works of art of De Gregorio the same journey   of the reality of super- objectivity of that from Neue Sachilichkeit ( New Objectivity)and “the bridge” of Brucke from the expressionism hyper- subjectivity, which is open to the lyrical and transcendental artists and those so called “activists”, bound pragmatically to reality.  These are the latest that could have given a solution to the crisis of these times, between me and the reality, but not only that  it goes beyond an extraordinary artwork. Also from another point of view of the wide open separation between ordinary emotions and an experience denied, for the record, the  absolute sense of faith in life, watching this last solution, certainly in extraordinary artwork  terms , but not with reference to the position of a religious faith.
Looking closer at this solution it is not unlike that of the prefigured Barocchi artists, who as  it has been revealed, they conceded to the antireform to instill the dogma of the faith,  exactly for the reason of an exasperated game of concaves and convexes in the forms that have marked the triumph or the dramatic denial  of the religious reality of that time, with the reformation and the pillage of Rome.
The same  theological tensions are contained in the tormented message of Carlo De Gregorio, linguistically and idealistically sustained by a “finalized image” that promptly reminds us of the art of the 600’s- a belief in something that is not present, however  all in all it is possible” (G.C Argan), awaiting for the principle relationship between living nature of humanity and the infinite nature of the divine, that both are connected, but not confused with the unity of the person. 
Therefore we can agree that as well as the divine nature confirmed by De Gregorio that through a tight and rational persuasiveness of non-pictorial order, contained in the decoration and in the elegance of the chromatic image  that is assumed irrationally by the strong tones on a transcendent  functional order, that confirms the spiritual values of the plastic dynamism and of the unfinished dimension, they take part of the concrete space in which we live in. But above all it reconfirms that the total conscience internal-external and the reality-transcending  does not need particularly illustrative signs of theological  anthropology,  for us all to be with knowledge of the Divine, or as Pascal said, make friends with Christ until the end of the world.

Scrittore e critico d'arte Luigi Tallarico