Vittorio Amadio

the hand is faster than the mind

Art is a flight. Often of the soul. It is everything and nothing: the visualisation of a transport, a thought, an emotion and at the same time a big splendid game destined to repeat itself ad infinitum, without interruptions, pauses, or captious breaks.
Often I think of the drawings of those children who attempt to capture the world around them tracing the confines of their limited experience. I prefer children's drawings because they are marked by immediacy, spontaneity, and are devoid of technical and stylistic concerns that, in my view, deprive art of its communicative essence with its spirit lost.. It is my theory that spots of a single solid colour without nuances lends breath and vibrancy to the canvas.
In all my paintings, big or small, I work with lightning speed convinced that my hand is faster than my mind. For me a work of Art begins and ends in a moment, in a furious continuous stroke of the brush. Rethinking a painting in progress is not an artistic endeavour and the "final touch" is almost always an absurd flourish as if the traces of the artist on the canvas could actually be legitimised by it. I do not sign my paintings. I've done it a few times perhaps at the beginning of my career, but my feeling for many years has been that even a signature would disrupt a direct relationship between my work and the observer.
I never prefigure to paint either horizontally or vertically or determine the top or bottom of a canvas. I imagine, I fly, I explore interspaces, I wear immensity immersed in my essential conjectures of a continuously evolving context with an unstoppable dynamism that counters the laziness and complacency of our times.
I do not seek refuge in anything, or anyone, convinced as I am that the artistic experience represents the fulfilment of one's character. I approach Art head on and I feel at ease being overcome by lines, circles, ovals, ellipses and by the tridimensional aspect of a work that narrates nature: the sky and the sea, the flourishing land and the desert. I see and navigate rivers and oceans on the wings of my imagination, beyond logic, outside of any scheme that can be treated in any theoretical consideration of man's artistic endeavour.
Art is accomplished day by day, moment by moment holding one's breath. Schemes are good for the fools and the lazy, for those who lacking character seek refuge in conventional formulae established by others. The true artist is one who overcomes limits and limitations because what he perceives as reality is not satisfactory and does render justice to the beauty and complexity of the world. The true artist does not pretend to portray an intrinsically universal concept of beauty such as the one promoted by the media because there is nothing more ephemeral than that. Everything is beautiful and nothing is. Beauty has no standard measurements nor a single standard of evaluation. Beauty is only a passing dream.
My works can only represent my endeavour because what gives meaning to them is the observer who perhaps sees in them a reflection of himself. It would please me if viewing my works would induce some thinking because, it seems to me we live in a complacent world in which everything is standardised, ready-made and wrapped in a convenient morality. At times it seems that, in assessing art, we have gone back to the notion of the so-called common sense of decency that applies to all while for the artist the only sense of decency remains a personal coherence and the consciousness of being a free and thinking agent. Art is everything and nothing. Art is a flight. Often of the soul. Certainly, mine.