by Fabiola Naldi

 

The long artistic career of Andrea Chiesi has already amply demonstrated to what extent the time and spaces of the places chosen by the artist in his imagination are deeply entrenched in our daily lives.

These industrial spaces combine and sometimes alternate through a pictorial style that is faithful to the manner of surveying typical of the French situationists but even more of the lettered art of Isidore Isou. Trees, metallic ruins, woodlands and industrial spaces are all treated in the same manner: extracted from their initial context (which survives in the painting only to give the spectator a clue as to their identity) they are all cut up under the microscope and brought back to life in fragmentary form and visual blow-ups. The anti-narrative cutup of the writing of William Burroughs is similar to the way the artist cuts up his point of view, translating Chiesi’s aesthetic priority, which is constituting the new psychological and geographical vision of the spaces we live in.

Naturally, by alienating some part of the visual composition, what remains is only a detail, at times a horrific and always silent detail. But by drawing closer to every clue reproduced and presented, we can discern background noise, almost like a gentle whispering.

Every example of painting bears with it the germ of “unseizability” and lack of consistency, while the subject tackled moves between concrete architecture (industrial, urban) and constructions of the mind and of a visual and photographic memory. Time and its imperceptible consistency draw the attention of the spectator into strange nocturnal and diurnal landscapes. What remains is the observer, who like a furtive voyeur climbs over the architectural barriers, over the structural interruptions of a horizon that is restricted into tiny punctual and analytic visions. But it is here that Chiesi’s skilful intention as an artist lies. We have to go somewhere, we have to overcome something, whether these be trials or simple trips. In painting, the whole becomes alienating, isolated, insuperable as though the artist himself knows that that infinite time and that inscrutable space were nothing other than a projection of our mind. Not a photograph in this case, but a picture based on reality, modifying and overwhelming it from the inside. The places shown (highly cinematographic and narrative) do exist, perhaps, but it is not this that is truly important. Even if they were hallucinations of a dangerous mind, the two-dimensional surface transcends the obvious, giving us a new visual ‘magic’.