Lorenzo de Angelis

Viterbo (1989)

His research has painting itself as the main object, giving an insight view into its procedures, methods and syntactic. His focus allows him to see gestures, colors and fullness and voids as elements which can be first divided and then synthesized. The artist disregards the notion of authorship by conceiving the painted surface as an active agent in the artistic process. By doing so, he employs paper as the source of color that, once pressed on the canvas (or linen), makes this latter act directly on the final outcome incorporating or rejecting the matter (Monopluriplanes; serie). The sign itself is permeated by void as in the Japanese ink painting techniques (kan pi and fei pai) and, at the same time, undergoes a repetition and alienation process. The result is a surface in which the non-pigmented areas acquire spatial dynamism. The hierarchical relations between addition and subtraction, centrifugal and centripetal forces are cancelled and integrated as one in a single system: the image. Thus, it is the canvas itself that gets rearranged on both syntactic and semantic levels. According to De Angelis view, this element is not a passive color receptor but a surface on which it is possible to achieve the balance between self-affirmation and self-obliteration, authorship and unpredictability, idea and automatism.