They shine in darkness

About

«I couldn't understand the instructions I was getting [in class], so I just went out on the streets.» 
(Mostly about Rauschenberg, 1975)

It might seems there's no place for poetry, stories, or myths in the contemporary art scene. It looks especially evident in the work of those artists who research mostly on form, matter and tecnique, instead of thinking about the message to transmit. It is as the overlapping of images that surrounds us decreased our narrative attitude as persons, before that of the artists' who, as a consequence, tend to close themselves into the act of working without realizing the risk of making thinks that could end up as sterile exercise and nothing more.
On the contrary, Andrea Fiorino (b. Augusta, Italy 1990) is a very young interpreter of his own time, and his artistic practice moves from an imaginary made of real episodes, introspections from his own weighty and deeply intense, sometimes melanchonic, personality. A very rare thing to find in this century made of screens and virtual, intangible, far realities. His style is naïf at a first glance, but reveals soon the almost maniacal attention for the material he choices, for composition and the chromatic spectre. But those elements don't make the whole heavy, on the contrary they highlight the narration.
Moving from a fantastic and tribal universe which is influenced by artists as Henri Rousseau or Kiki Smith, Fiorino's newest artworks, on show for the occasion, talk about everyday experiences and link together fragments of the real with dreamy and onorical suggestions. Those are possible thanks to a wide knowledge of the history of art and that of the contemporary cultural scene, which he learned from outside the academy. Maybe the same “outside” from which Robert Rauschenberg learned that it is possible to grasp by everything and everyone. In Fiorino's case, this leads to his personal interest that mixes low and high culture, skipping throughout the so called “South of the world” tradition – those of the primitive or developing countries – to episodes taken by his own neighbourhood, friends' tales, representing people into their private. The last works, in particular, show an untangible personal space that is even more separated from our world and linked to another one that is hidden in secret. That's why canvases often represent a single figure – who sometimes is the artist himself – who doesn't look the beholder in the eyes, because he's concentrated to look at an uncertain elsewhere, maybe in search of peace.

“Sometimes you ask yourself 'Where's the peace?' Everybody is always talking about peace, but, as long you find peace in what you doing then you successful, and that's what people don't realize. See, you got do stuff till where you can go sleep at night. Cause the glory is, is in you.” (Solange, Interlude: the glory is in you)

Peace, a segret and never totally concious glory and white, that evades with strenght between Fiorino's tools, giving to every artwork a look which reminds me of the two-colour frescos of the Italian Renaissance period. The adjunction of crayons makes the colour help to focus on some key-zones, as a dividing line that highlights the drawing as a medium itself. Drawing is put on a higher step than painting, that was the artist's favorite medium in the previous series. Moreover, by using colored crayons, the characters are given a fresh charge, although their firm and hieratic look. They immediatly get a new kind of pathos and an unexpected kind of motion, so that they seem to leave the white background, appearing to the beholders' eyes as some drawings of their childhood. Fiorino's artworks shine with the light of a spirituality that involves even those falls to the ground, those memories of pure, un-filtered, unrestrained-lived feelings.

Andrea Fiorino lives and works in Milan. He has recently graduated in Painting at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts and has already exhibited his work in many occasions. Between his solo-shows we remind “If you come back” (Sant'Ambrogio of the Victory Abbey, Milan), “Paradise Lost” (Circoloquadro, Milan) and the bi-personal with artist Riccardo Gusmaroli “Della stessa sostagna” (Of the same matter), held into the new location of Circoloquadro. He works with Opere Scelte gallery in Turin.