Marsh Fire, Georgetown, SC from the collection of South Carolina Arts Commission

Marsh Fire, Georgetown, SC, 1988

oil on canvas

18 x 26 in

Signature: signed on lower right

As a child in Italy, I was introduced to drawing and writing at the same time so that painting and reading became constant and almost interchangeable activities. In New York in 1960, I met a small group of American painters who, remarkably, felt as estranged from the Mediterranean tradition as I did. If my concerns originated in nostalgia for my past, theirs were the expression of an intellectual loss. Conversely, as modernist art and architecture created part of the fabric of their individual experiences, modernism presented me with a new subject of study. As I grew to appreciate the idiosyncrasy of modernist pictorial structure, I saw no reason why painting could not be equally, if not more poetic, exciting and truly international by re-engaging the full range of its traditional genres, modes, themes and plastic possibilities.

I came to regard painting independently of style as the inherited complex of individually simple plastic structures that create metaphoric relations between form and subject, and analogies between form and form, and between subject and subject. By addressing prototypical themes and formal knowledge, these operations can eventually become an exegesis and an enlargement of the conventional past, and as such, a simultaneous study of culture, form, nature and perception.

This view contrast sharply with modernism’s artificial distinction between mimetic and metaphorical structures, but not, as my work shows, with modernism’s emphasis on the expressive logic of form, per se.
I have merely allowed the general and universal meaning of style to develop slowly through investigations that create specific new insights.

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