by Fabiola Naldi

Some years ago, I asked Davide Nido to list me the “masters” guilty of having passed on to him a constant and eager striving for new and unexpected materials. The reply was quick and certain: Luciano Fabro and Aldo Mondino. The first was his teacher at the academy, the second his master and mentor of “irreverent” technical conceptual solutions with which he faithfully interacted. Davide Nilo has followed the advice of the great Aldo Mondino: show a particular attention for all unconventional materials and unite them in a continuously provocative taste. The pupil has not sought always different components on which to impress the index of a firm stylistic intention: the “disciple” has chosen a single alternative material to the classics of pictorial art, and he has flung himself on this, studying all its possible combinations and alterations.

In this, his master Mondino, is always present. One can choose different materials, or concentrate on one in particular: the important thing is to move forward, go beyond, not content myself with a single material but to enjoy entertaining the observer with creative “marvels”. I believe that the simultaneously serious and playful stance of Mondino’s principle works still bear an influence on Nido’s technical processes, despite the fact that the pupil has freed himself of the “cumbersome” presence of the master. In the instant in which Davide Nido came across silicon glue, his destiny was forged: it was henceforth impossible to go back; he could only move forward curiously in small (and apparently decorative) experimental steps, and he certainly did.
And thus it was. Tube after tube, colour after colour, canvas after canvas, his process took shape and his practice appeared alongside the theory, nourishing the fruitful work of an artist I consider in a “post-modern” meaning of the term. Davide Nido is not simply a painter, just as he is not simply a plastic inventor of strange “silicon waves” lapping on a canvas resigned to being no more than a two-dimensional support of a more complex and structured design.

I have considered his way of working and have reflected on the narrative intensity of the trajectories of his glues: the way of processing material and involving it in a more broad plastic construction is typical of the planning phases of architects and designers. An initial coating covers the virgin canvas with a single colour that varies from time to time; the first “casting” is then covered with further layers using a glue pistol (as used by carpenters, electricians and mechanics) which fires a small quantity of silicon glue onto the support, perfectly controlled by the innocuous “killer”, in order to produce a partial perceptive manipulation of the background. What emerges is a game of “can see/can’t see” that assists the visual stimulation but also the retinal confusion of the eye. What appears at first gaze? The background or all those strange abstract monochrome or polychrome forms that cling to the canvas? The fulls and voids face and flank each other, and the cold tones of the glue are mixed with the warm colours of the painted background on the canvas, with the horizontal lines crossing the vertical ones.

Davide Nido chooses the road of conceptual and material abstraction only superficially. I believe that Nido is not at all an abstract artist, but a concrete one given the force with which he never leaves his constructions suspended between presence and absence.

Nothing is left to the chance of the moment: everything is imagined, designed, built with detailed analysis, and the result is not the abstraction of a precise vision, but the further construction of an imaginary movement planned by the artist. And it is for this reason that Davide Nido is a concrete artist and he is so in the only way in which it is possible at the moment: by exploiting the other, the different, both in terms of materials and functions, in order to define the borders of one’s artistic modus operandi.