• Vitae, or the splendor of vitality

"The momentum of life of which we speak consists in a need for creation" H. Bergson

Vito Di Bella, Giuliana Paolucci, and Luana Romano, with Vitae, intend to conjure up the grandiose ghost of Henri Bergson to make a convenient doormat to their pictorial pursuits. They argue with the French philosopher that life, like a bundle of stems, explodes in divergent directions all under the banner of extraordinary creation and unstoppable momentum. Let us immediately enter medias res.

Vito Di Bella loves and esteems Fausto Pirandello, but disputes his philosophy. Bathers. To the merciless and tragic carnality of the son of the great Luigi, he opposes an actuality that is not such. Nothing but the Greece of Kavafis superimposed triumphantly on our world. The vibrant writing demonstrates the inexhaustible vitalism of pleasure. Its youths at the sea are none other than Orpheus and Narcissus, once again, descended "to miracle show." Theirs is, precisely, an image of fulfillment, a vision of a pagan Eden that sees ultimate (if utopian) redemption in the expansion of a sensuality that sings to the world in spite of the inquisitors' funereal murmur.

Giuliana Paolucci believes in humanity and in its dynamic, colorful, unescapable life; she has a suspicion that existence, at its core, is heavy and hard. That is why she entrusts painting with the task of lightening the cosmos so that it escapes its destiny as matter of theetta. 

 Here is the color that melts, evaporates, wills and dreams

liquescent. To lighten the world and men also means to land on the terrain of poetry; a poetry marked by a Dionysism exempt, however, from morbidity and madness.

From life, however, Luana Romano argues, we cannot remove the tragic. The painter oscillates between figuration and abstraction; incredible are her "cities" that burn in the fire of an overflowing and metaphysical fire; a fire that dreams of Dante and Bosch. Luana Romano: a contemporary re-edition of the Sublime; she lays bare her romantic soul; the "landscape," in its apocalypse, indicates a beauty outside the norm. Stunningly, the scenery of the world darkens and the flute of the nymphs drowns in a bonfire both funereal and irresistible.

Let us ask ourselves, in conclusion, where these three vitalisms spring from. The answer, in our opinion, is quite simple. They originate from the vitality of painting, which is exalted in its mockery of the numerous (as unsuccessful as they are) declarations of death. But that is not enough; in their exuberance, Vitae's works declare that art is the place where existence fails and Being appears in all its eternal impermanence. The world of the imaginary, an imaginary of which our three authors are convinced victims, denounces a time outside of time and, at the same time, a time all in our time. 

 The real, Sartre asserts, is never beautiful; beauty, they conclude, refers only to the vision that finds in painting, we repeat, its privileged place and the only paradise we are granted. Of such a paradise, we, the users, are the parasites amazed, enchanted and hopelessly seduced.

Robertomaria Siena