Vitae, or the splendour of vitality. ‘The impetus 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 evoke the grandiose ghost of Henri Bergson to make a convenient doormat for their pictorial research. With the French philosopher, they argue 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 great Luigi's son, he opposes an actuality that is not such. Nothing but the Greece of Kavafis triumphantly superimposed on our world. The vibrant writing demonstrates the inexhaustible vitalism of pleasure. His young men at the sea are none other than Orpheus and Narcissus, once again, descended ‘to miracle show’. Theirs is, precisely, an image of fulfilment, the vision of a pagan Eden that sees ultimate (albeit 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, colourful, unescapable life; she suspects that existence, at its core, is heavy and hard. This is why she entrusts painting with the task of lightening the cosmos so that it escapes its destiny as a matter of matter. Here is the colour that melts, evaporates, wants and dreams itself liquescent. Lightening the world and mankind also means landing on the terrain of poetry; a poetry marked by a Dionysism free, however, from morbidity and madness.

From life, however, argues Luana Romano, we cannot remove the tragic. The painter oscillates between figuration and abstraction; incredible are her ‘cities’ that burn in the fire of an overflowing, 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 blaze that is both baleful 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 exalts itself in its mockery of the numerous (as much as unsuccessful) declarations of death. But that is not enough; in their exuberance, Vitae's works declare that art is the place where existence fades away 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, says Sartre, is never beautiful; beauty, they conclude, refers solely to the vision that finds in painting, we repeat, its privileged place and the only paradise that is granted to us. Of such a paradise, we, the viewers, are the amazed, enchanted and hopelessly seduced parasites.

Robertomaria Siena