CROSSINGS
By Mariarosaria Pranzitelli
The encounter with the materiality of thought is for Damiani a choice of life. In his work we immerse themselves in materiality and spirituality in his everyday sense. His research is not only a going beyond a sterile dualism between matter and form, between concrete and abstract, but it is their mutual 'touch', as the philosopher J would say. L. Nancy.
A study of the limit and the boundary is perceived through the use of colors and the ever renewed choice of materials. A playful and sometimes sudden search that connects childhood to maturity, the unknown to the known, the unexpected to the usual.
The 'modeling clay' reminiscent of children's games draws adult and severe faces that carry with them, thanks to these materials, the imprint of childhood.
What is the meaning of the artistic gesture when all meanings have become in-significant? This is what he investigates in research and in his daily practice: the art of the essential gesture. Essential for those who do it, there is nothing new in this, indeed what has always characterized those who enter a creative flow returns, in that vital momentum that must be interpreted as a need.
It may seem too much or too little, but this does not matter if the threshold is once again a search without a predetermined time, but with all the force, as the artist affirms, of the 'galantuomo tempo'.
How many crossings. How many limits that open up new explorations. The organic and the inorganic, the open and closed, the present that seeks a new relationship with the outside of itself.
If you look at the various phases of the artist's work, a line of continuity is traced: the awareness that material and immaterial are in a relationship of reciprocity and not of simple passages, but of crossings. It is material that becomes more and more immaterial until it is transformed into its contour and there it becomes meaning, object and concept.
The sense, like a push that moves matter, constitutes its limit and precisely in that limit lies its rise and its outlining as an idea.
Wittgenstein's increasingly cited statement “The limits of my language are the limits of my world” could be interpreted artistically: where I find a limit there is the desire and search for a crossing, of a going beyond that leaves a trace and a material sign, a glimmer or a fragment of matter.
In all Damiani's works this instance is strong: transparency, materials of waste of the work that look like the work, the emptiness that is filled and vice versa. Both the abstract and the figurative are present in his works, because the artist's choice is not to cage himself in simplifications and categories, but from time to time to let the expressive instance choose its form.
In portraits the intensity and precision of the sign, they dig a trace that takes on strength in the short shadow it engraves. The color that is the background and does not have a defined outline shows the need to evoke the indefinite as a singular way of exposing and being exposed. He is an a-sé being, a singular being who seeks his own way of returning to himself. In these portraits the looks look at us and re-look at us.
There is no age and date simply chronological, but all of his work feels the need to turn that habitual use of materials into a frame into a form that keeps its lightness intact and its crossing and being crossed. It is no coincidence that his 'mosquito screens' wrap around the frame and hold different colors and materials that draw faces with minimal precision.
In this and in something more lies the rigor of his exploration and the reuse of materials: as a chemist studies the organic and the inorganic, as a poet studies the meaning and its meaning.