INVISIBLE PERCEPTIONS

The conceptual reasons and the choices

The itinerant road that we intended to take with the Bartolomeo Gatto Foundation, of course, is the most impervious and unexpected one, but certainly the most involved and sentimental.

And our iconic Doge and friend Marco Nereo Rotelli, giant of art and refined intellectual, was the first to want to marry the cause and nature of everything that will happen because, like few other refined thinkers and artists, he enjoys a gift that only the artistic nature can bestow on some minds: the openness and democracy of the soul. And it is for this reason that, opening the doors of his home, of his beautiful Artist Studio in Milan, it is from here that Bartolomeo Gatto's long journey will begin, once again, wandering and perennial, towards new and unexpected, fragile drifts. and heavy as boulders, wonderful and hissing like the most sober and, indeed, invisible winds. But not absent for this, on the contrary.

If you look at Andrew Wyeth's painting Wind from the Sea [1947], you will understand precisely what is meant. In that painting, the passage of the wind, of course, is not seen, but the power of delicacy is perceived thanks to its refraction on the curtain at the framed window which, like an indispensable breath of air, satisfies that hunger for Life - not for existence, mind you - that all of us sometimes perceive and need in our most suffocating and complicated moments.

Like a medication of the spirit, a sigh that lifts us from the dramas of a few seconds before and manages, like Poetry, to do so even for just a few seconds but in an unequivocal and definitive way.

The unexpected connection that persists between Bartolomeo Gatto and Marco Nereo Rotelli is just that: the presence of Poetry, in both, as the least common multiple between their artistic creations and Works.

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Poetry and Perception

There is, at the base of the work of both, an elusive that escapes us all the time and does not let itself be captured.

Marco Nereo Rotelli frequents words assiduously and confidentially, in a clear, clear, powerful, poignant, symbolic, meaningful way, using them in their meaning and even distorting them in the graphic form with a harmony that only the most refined balances can allow; Bartolomeo Gatto, on the other hand, a man who preferred to frequent, use and even exist within the silence, the monolithic nature, the hermeticism of the hiss, is silent and lets us perceive Poetry not through words, but through images.

Marco Nereo Rotelli: who deliberately unravels his words, his works, in an apparently chaotic - but in reality, very precise and thoughtful way - he leaves the last word to the viewer, without even accompanying him, almost forgetting it sweetly, in honor of an unbridled and variable freedom: as freedom always is, in the most sublime Poems and the most unattainable peaks.

On the contrary, Bartolomeo Gatto believes in freedom, yes, but he induces us to follow him in the search for it. He wants to show it to us. He wants us to enjoy it with him. From a certain point of view, it is as if the Artist were defining the contours of Life. As if he saw them clearly in front of him and wanted to share their amazement with us. it needs rules, statutes, scaffolding, armor: in order not to attack the heart of the observer. He protects it by establishing the rules of the sentimental walk inside the Opera. She protects him, she cares about him, to the point of supporting him.

 

 

Time and space

G.act is as if, continuously, expanding Time and Space. perceptible heartbeat is that of Love. Bartolomeo Gatto's scenarios are filled with pleasant puzzles and question marks: it is not known where they are, where they are going, where they come from and how long they will still be there.

They are immersive and overwhelming, like an abyss in which nothing is heard except what is pounding from within ourselves, through the rhythm of Poetry and of the soul.

When Bartolomeo Gatto paints the Stones, they do not have the unbearable weight of the boulder: on the contrary, hovering, they appear as if they can rise towards the sky, losing all their enormous physicality, their antonomasic corpulence. They do not turn out to be matter.

It seems, yes, that they have studied matter but also that they deviate from it: becoming an expansion of the dream and lightness in its pure state. Ineffable matter.

To the stones, the concept of elsewhere is not granted. Only in Bartolomeo Gatto is this possible. Those stones, in their stillness, although floating, seem, in fact, to be able to move, almost liquidly, in the osmotic drawers of our souls, of our feelings: unmasking our frailties.

Fragility and feelings that, stoic and monolithic, in the end, as in the purest, genuine and sincere obsessions, find a home and shelter from the outside world always in the same dimension, in the same reassuring and unsettling images: which rape and soften, disturb and caress the our hearts.

I'mimmobile but not inert[Horace].

In the Pietre by Bartolomeo Gatto, there is the summer of the soul of all of us. The one in which the most beautiful, most precious and most unscratchable memories are kept. Those motionless in memory, but not inert in the heart.

 

The reasons of the heart

Gatto starts from a psychological process that we have all tickled and, sometimes in life, superficially called into question: that of the anthropization of the inanimate. Of being able, through the power of the mind, to give Life to what surrounds us that is not alive: attributing human forms to it and, sometimes, when the catharsis of the imagination becomes a real agonistic, hypnotic and very deep trance, even feelings. Just as, for example, many of us are able to extrapolate from the vagueness of the shape of the clouds in the skies, a series of mental and representative figures of the metaproject of the mind, declining forms without reason and meaning into real mental stories to be told in silence - and as, for example, many others do it by giving faces to hills, buildings or, more commonly, cars in the street: seeing mouths in the grille, noses in the coats of arms and eyes in the headlights -

Bartolomeo Gatto, looking at the stones, imagines life: he precisely grasps it and represents it: managing to defeat that saying according to which “blood cannot be extracted from a stone”.

Well, Bartolomeo Gatto's stones are overflowing with blood instead! They overflow with pulsations, vibrate almost like skin, flesh and Life in the veins.

They become humans who love, suffer, dream, fall, have their own story that, with his talent, Bartolomeo Gatto tells every time - on canvas. All this, through a process of happy obsession and imagination that establishes that the stones are the point to look at where the whole world worth living is enclosed.

Bartolomeo Gatto, leaves us all his love as an inheritance and contributes to the Poetry of Life with his own, very personal, sublime verse: that consoles. It consoles as it relieves and consoles as it unites loneliness.

And it does it with a grace, with a lightness, with a wisdom and elegance that only the greatest possess.

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Luca Cantore D'Amore