Critics Critics
Pierre Restany
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Escaping time, Gatto’s forms acquire a formal bravery, a hieratic sacredness which is absolutely unique and specific.
These elements of spirituality while painting, create a kind of “super humanity” as transcendence of forms.
In my opinion this purity of language also gives specificity to the message, to the style. In front of this mineral universe of Gatto, I feel as being in front of a world without misunderstandings, where actions are slow and fragmented, embraces are naturally monumental.
The slowness of figurative movements corresponds to a timeless dimension of vision.
To enter this world means to live all useless discourse elements outside, to go together with Gatto, towards the mineral heart of things.
To enter this world means to live all useless discourse elements outside, to go together with Gatto, towards the mineral heart of things.The painter’s heart can also be found in the intervention of colour. The colour as feeling. The colour as a success of vision. Gatto’s stones are not icy, they are not cold as those of the dead people’s towns. They have got a vibrating skin, a hot and sensitive surface.Human paradox had only seldom been expressed with such an ability in the mineral language. Gatto’s pictorial effects are mineral inasmuch they wipe out any semblance of rhetoric.The design is fine and sharp as the stone angles are; but when the stone becomes flesh all shudders of feelings are there and give a right life to these existential elements which become ours because they are assumed and perceived as ours. The linguistic trend is of a humanistic and vital kind. As a conclusion I dare say that the deepest mark that Gatto’s visual discourse has left inside me is just this lesson of humanity through the immemorial reference of the stone and its history.To humanize the mineral universe in order to make life in itself and for itself more present.I thank Gatto for this gift: his vision is strong, powerful and attractive. His stones speak and can create big visual poems. Stone characters are our brothers in the memory, that is in the reality of our very next future, they are simply our brothers and at the same time they are our direct ancestors, they help us in seeing further, in feeling more deeply, in living better.
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Everardo Dalla Noce
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In Gatto’s works individual approaches, constructions add together in a combination of tensions overtaking time and matter in showing the future. But if philosophy is the establishment of a thought, which is deeply motivated, that is how its conclusions are written in the research that Gatto is going to continue. The natural event is a sure consideration, not a probability.In Sardinia Gatto catches from the rocks (“stones”) the sense of the continuity of creation.Continuity which is life, participation, then love. And in the post-Enlightenment philosophy this sole conception of poetry can find a place.
It is the imagination which here has a prophetic evidence, it is the sequence which undisturbed moves within patterns, with its sequential power. If at the beginning the moon had to be reached by the man made adolescent in order to get his own hope, here the stones that the man has generated become conscious of the imponderable.Stone which is entity, then (unexpressed) reason, then logus-dialogue. Or better: logus-tale. From this conception Gatto’s search, made it easier by the fact that the “rock”, although its massive nature, is friable and tameable, and gathers way. Just as an individual. And if hearing the whisper of stone is not allowed by our audibility threshold, to penetrate its dynamic will is really possible.Here is the artist’s intervention. An intervention which, mind that, is not surrealistic or imaginative as deriving from a fleeting interpretation, but it is reduced in concreteness because it is seen beyond the thought.
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Anna Lorito
The idyllic Sensiblerie of the artist Bartolomeo Gatto at the time of the Coronavirus
21 December 2020
The youtube video topic "# Art does not stop" configures the mantra of the relentless vocation to the story of the painter and sculptor Bartolomeo which unwinds incessantly in an over sixty-year artistic itinerary that boasts prestigious exhibitions in Italy and in the United States.
The youtube video topic "# Art does not stop" configures the mantra of the relentless vocation to the story of the painter and sculptor Bartolomeo which unwinds incessantly in an over sixty-year artistic itinerary that boasts prestigious exhibitions in Italy and in the United States.
This enchanted universe, the result of metaphysical visions, gives voice to an Apollonian ethos which acutely reveals an insurgence of thought that ranges between mythical and fantastic, and which, taking on the mystery of magic and omens, harpoons itself with a powerful leap to the present experience.
The iconographic-imaginative system of the artist who praises the meditation of "being-in-the-world" the vision of things hidden in silent wisdom, detachment and change, is constantly increased by new dynamics, new daring of expressiveness of the lines and of the modeled graphic-stylistic field.
Gatto sophisticated sensiblerie, from a perceptual point of view, breaks out in the full-bodied series of paintings "Itineraries at the time of the Corona Virus" to which he dedicated himself during the last lockdown, whose access key is attested by a unitary rhythmic impetus of intersection of surfaces and modular tops with bright colors that radiate their internal volume.
Bartolomeo Gatto applies a stereometrization of figurations in his paintings, alluding to the intensification of the voice that comes from things and to the invisible energies that act in the intimate reality of life. A first idea about these latest compositions, conceived in a solipsistic vision, suggests that the pure rhythm of color wins and takes advantage of a refinement and enrichment of elementary forms, generating an authentic melody of simplified geometric designs placed in an atmosphere of cadenced silence. .
In representing movement, the artist reconnects to the stylistic register of the beginnings of the "loving stones" series of the early 2000s, but inscribes in the works a circular distortion of accidental geometric-stereometric shapes in perspective dance, which collide and they support each other with the decomposition of diagonals that cross simultaneously in a happy and reassuring balance of the four fundamental directions: horizontal in rest, vertical in ascent, diagonal in motion, and a circle that binds and connects everything.
The overwhelming height of the visual angles transfers the individual visual moments into spatial continuity and simultaneity, grasping the synoptic vision of the pictorial grisaille whose central point is an intimate connection of simple geometric surfaces, pyramidal triangles and circles that, in a temporal succession of movement and in a radiant and ringing chord of the chromatic palette gives us a powerful rhythm of forms that stage a fracted gesture full of an "idea of lightness" understood not as a static gesture but as visible mobility.
A performative affirmation of actuality shines through the significant canvases exhibited in temporal suspension such as: "Indelible Sign", "Beyond the Virus the wonders of Creation";, "United forever";, "Towards the High", ";Immersi di Azzurro" , "Balls in the sky";, "Awakening", "Eternal Warriors", "Becoming becomes the passage of Being", metaphorical iconographies where everything is filled by the struggle of Light against Darkness, everything is energy that is released in diagonal chromatic interpenetration and volumetric of the forms that abolishes the insurmountable barrier between the inside and the outside, between the extrinsic and intrinsic world.
In Gatto's paintings, dreamy and random visions of rocky boulders and "dancing stones" are crowded as translated fields of existence and where the volumes become purified forms-expressions that are exalted rhythmically by emerging from the intense blue and red, transfusing into the yellow and green, violet and fuchsia; colors that excite each other with the geometry of the shapes that change, from light to dark and convert from near to far, generating a wildly explosive emotion, as can be found in the works: "The Earth remains, despite the Changing";, "Lightness", "Geometries"," Between Instant and Instant Creation";,"Becoming does not fall into Nothingness", "Multiplicity of things", "Conditions of Life ";,"Red Planet ","Bricconcella di Aggius", "Inebriating game"; and last but not least the work "And the Virus va"; with pseudo-infantile features; a corpus of suggestive images that seem to hymn to a quiet development of the creative energies of nature that joyfully recognize the unity of the whole being of Creation.
The gestural dynamics imprinted in the works strongly expresses the artist's theorem of leaving the tunnel of sterile solitude by relating to a new way of being over time in an attempt to solve indecipherable riddles. The expressive system of Gatto's aesthetic vision, dizzyingly full of a succession of instantaneous and diaphanous fluttering apparitions, conceived in the harmony of forms, gives life to a "gravitas" charged with an archaic and idiosyncratic imaginary syntonic to a charge of silent reactive pain.
The pathos everted from the canvases speaks of the meditative and chaotic aspect of dreams and accentuates the expansion of intimate contemplation, illuminating a sort of feeling of "primitive innocence" which in its evocative invention, wants to be a kind of cryptic message of demonization of primordial fears , sent from a symbolic world, and which, leading to the silence of vision, transforms itself into a matrix of “today" stories” with a hyper-symptomatic character which, in an inversion of values, offer themselves as fragments of a metaphysical capture of contemporaneity.