Open dreams of the language | Alex Caminiti

Solo show curated by Massimo Scaringella

Bushidō, 2020, Industrial enamel on canvas, 65x80cm

Bushidō, 2020, Industrial enamel on canvas, 65x80cm


It is good to consider the world as a dream. When we have a nightmare, we wake up and tell ourselves that we have only dreamed. It is said that the world we live in is no different. (Bushidō )

Under the title of "open dreams of language" the artist Alex Caminiti presents a series of his latest works all executed during the particular period we are experiencing because of the pandemic. For many years the artist's artistic research has rejected a classic way of observing the world around us but proposes a mysterious and ambiguous image at the same time clearly expressing the anxiety of modern man in the face of a deeply hostile nature. His works seem to accompany us in the continuous flow of life and the seasons, reflecting in abstract and shaded images like twilight vapors, a spread of light and joyful colors or furrows of darker colors to highlight a slow but inexorable passage of time. The pictorial world of Alex Caminiti is therefore an organism of colors, dazzling yellows diluted with grays and soft blacks crossed by blues and energetic reds through which the brushstrokes are arranged as sliding lines for the viewer and the space vibrates with emotions. But this time on a pictorial basis the artist wanted to insert words taken from the alphabet of Japanese ideograms of bushidō as if to underline the ethical importance of words at a time like this.

Generally in the West bushidō is confused with martial arts, but in reality we could define it a "code of ethics and morals", a sort of alphabet that underlies every aspect of life. A way to know oneself as a philosophy of life because our universe, after all, does not cross the boundaries of our mind, but probes every aspect of the intimate essence, measures the limits of one's own abilities. Scanning the depths of our inner self to let all our knowledge and creativity emerge from the depths of the unconscious. The words chosen by Caminiti as "Love", "Virtue", "Honor", "Courtesy", "Courage" are therefore freed from verbal meaning and use the strategy of using isolated letters apparently as graphic elements but in reality as an expression of the concept expressed in the work. This way of proceeding investigates the possibilities that language possesses to go deep into the most secret layers of the spectator.

These works therefore represent a fascinating journey into the ethics of nature in which the dreams of the past foreshadow the fascination of future dreams and which color does not cancel but transforms into poetry.

Massimo Scaringella

Artists