The subjects of his work range from quiet seascapes or lake views to intense portraits of the elderly, young women or children.
Some recurring motifs stand out: water, as a cathartic element in which the upheavals of daily life drown and sublimate into a serene sense of peace; sails, emblematic of an airy grace that returns across his subjects, and at the same time evoking a longing for freedom and the calm of a smooth water surface; masks, as an element of mystery but also of play, revealing a joyful personality that governs and moderates passion and vitality to adapt to the severity of everyday life.
The humanity the painter portrays—painted without real models and filtered through a powerful imagination, yet enriched by an extraordinary attention to realistic details—places before us the stages of life: children intent on their games or spellbound, frozen in an eternal instant as if by a camera; they are the supreme representation of beauty and grace, as are the ballerinas, observed with a fatherly tenderness. Wonder at beauty is also expressed in portraits of young women, modestly nude, without any contrived pose, yet still conveying eros and sensuality, captured and heightened by the painter’s eye. The elderly, finally, bring us back to the world of old craftsmen: in the care for a boat or a fishing net the value of work emerges, that ancient honesty the painter—almost a poet—seems to seek in the contemporary world. Painting, practiced in the privacy of the studio, in an intimate and concentrated atmosphere, seems to underline the need to draw from within rather than to receive from outside. The open-air has, on the other hand, already been observed earlier and fixed in an author’s snapshot that the artist loves to evoke through the filter of his memories and sensations.
(Antonella Menicagli)