When,
I met Angelo Navetta this summer during
a poetry evening, I didn’t
know that
Navetta was a painter, neither did he know
of my literary activity,but I perceived
his sensitivity and I believe that also
he perceived mine.From that moment our meetings
have become more frequent and I have been
able to be acquainted with Navetta’s pictorial
world, and to deepen a relationship which
has become profitable, interesting, stimulating.Some
years ago Navetta painted entrusting the
power of his expressivity to vast backgrounds
which often had a circle in the middle.
It was the tension towards perfection, towards
light which “compelled him” to move in those
spaces, which however had nothing sidereal
about them and despite the lack of shapes
they appeared vast warm glades. The relationship
with the infinite passed through the heart,
through the sentiment, spread and produced
colours and shades whose tones extended
into a deep embrace with nature Navetta
did not evade this embrace, in fact he charged
it with symbols, even metaphors and allegories,
until he gave his works an almost mystical
spiritual value, sensually mystical, physically
gentle and persuasive.Navetta, at the time,
was convinced that man has to find inside
himself the reasons for his being and not
in the jurisdiction of a job that one is
obliged to do for sustenance. He worked
abroad, his tension and his attention always
had to be alert for negotiations and other
tasks and when finally he found the moment
to relax, to give in to himself, then the
paintbrushes, to use a strong image, pawed
to excavate into the real self, to read
the world in its unpublished dimension,
to fathom the mysterious passages of light
through echoes which came to him from afar,
from the brilliant dawn, from his radiant
land of origin, open to the winds, to the
myth.Our painter then, slowly, brought modifications
to his own artistic panorama.The painted
subjects became more fundamental, the backgrounds
stirred and from reds, browns and greens
turned into a little blue, a little yellow
and ochre.But now the game is not played
on the interposal of the backgrounds and
the geometric shapes created by colour used
directly from the tube. The substance has
revealed its secret, the chrysalis has become
a butterfly, and so every painting has become
a song to life, a window onto the world.The
Portrait of the daughter, for example, does
not look at stopping the strokes of the
face with realistic harshness, the young
girl is caught in the charm of her twenties,
in the sweetness of a rich, fresh age, but
not alone; around her moves the shadow of
a boy and the symbolic objects of her existence.But
the most remarkable achievement Navetta
shows in those paintings in which he gives
free play to its symbolic-esoteric necessity.
One notes the details of the hands, which
return again and again in various forms,
one notes the countermelody of a detail
which has been the torment of many artists
even of the Renaissance. Angelo Navetta
doesn’t hesitate to emphasize the anatomical
form of the hands in their perfection, once
again the realistic element doesn’t really
interest him. He is interested in containing
in the palm of the hand, in the form of
the hand, a series of situations and indications
which result in offering and in warning.The
hand builds, models, destroys, caresses,
shoots, but never blindly carries out
orders. On some occasions in fact, we see
that Navetta includes an eye or some
other detail to avoid creating confusion.
Therefore a meeting is sparked off between
flowers or still life, or books, or something
else, so that the hands remain in the purity
of their message, in the absoluteness of
a truth to which it is necessary to cautiously
draw closer to, to finally find the answered
meaning of things. If we start from the
assumption that the hand expresses the idea
of power, of control and of activity, we
can understand immediately which mental
mechanisms bring forth a pictorial element
thus emphasised but never made (this must
be underlined) a cliché.In a volume
of oriental curiosites one can read in a
Taoist book, entitled The Treaty of the
Golden Flower, that the hand is discussed
illustrating the alchemic sense and the
etymologic roots. This would be an irrelevant
detail if we did not know that Navetta had
spent a long time also in India. But for
Angelo the hand is also a regal emblem (moreover
the Hebrew word iad means hand and means
power); I have not noticed whether he paints
mostly the right hand or the left one. For
the Chinese, the left hand means wisdom,
and if I am not mistaken, this is also the
same in the Buddhist world. However we never
see the hand closed because that of Buddha
never is. Naturally we can continue on this
road for quite a way, because the hand has
been depicted and interpreted in a thousand
different ways, from South America, to Asia,
to Europe. For Angelo, I believe, it is
a matter of an exclusively human synthesis
of masculine and feminine, on which symbols
of Cabbala create a shortcircuit of emotions
and establish a mystery relationship. However,I
repeat, it is not along this road that we
must accompany Navetta’s painting,but along
that of the realisation, of the aesthetic
solutions.During a long conversation with
him, he declared, candidly but firmly, thathe
knows how to paint. It could have seemed
an affermation – ight-heartedor thrown in
to provoke me, it is instead a self recognition
of identity, which must wipe out any doubts
immediately. In fact, those who pause with
attention to observe Angelo’s works notice
that every brush-stroke is the fruit of
a long job which nevertheless does not rely
on chance, but is prepared with care and
skill. The quality of the brush-stroke is
immediately visible, and tangible is the
rythmn which runs through the painted subjects
that with each other weave a tight body
to remain themselves and yet at the same
time become part of the perfectly amalgamated
whole. All this becomes possible because
Angelo Navetta, unlike improvisers and profit-seekers,
paints for his need. His internal richness
is great, the ideal incentives high, the
pleasure of communication felt and suffered.
Meeting his painting means finding or discovering
a liveable, airy, palpable place.No asphyxiated
atmospheres, no dismal presentiments, no
short-lived syllabification,no loans from
memory which often pile up stories and combine
certainties and incertainties; Navetta sings
out his ideal of beauty and he does it with
a pure heart, with the amazement of one
who discovers, each time, that behind the
exterior, behind the shapes, there are treasures
of every type.In short, he paints convinced
that the growth of human beings depends
always and forever on artists.
Dante
Maffìa |
