Salvatore Provino

Studio
Piazza San Francesco d'Assisi, 75
00153 Rome - Italy
Phone & Fax: +39 6 5895743

Having to choose between the representation of a subject and the construction of a pictorial object, Provino chose a long time ago an intermediate way, which makes him similar to artists of different times and tendencies: it is to fix the traces of an event leaving to the observer the task of building it again or ignoring it, whether he is satisfied or not to just verify the accomplished quality of the tecnique and of the pictorial matter.

Doing so, dedicating himself to the traces of what was on the sensible matter that is basically the cloth - but also, subsequently, the artist's memory and the observer's ability to fancy- Provino explores the relationship between the being and the nothing, between the having been of a body or an event and the not being any more, if not through traces, clues, or the negative footprints that could allow us to reevoke or maybe even re-own what is absent.

Leonardo, having being an unsurpassed observer of the visible world, left us, on the problem of <<being nothing>>, thoughts that enlighten us and help us to understand the position in which Salvatore Provino sees himself in this dialectic between the visible and the invisible.

<<What is called nothing - Leonardo wrote - is found only in time and in words: in time is found between the past and the future, and does not keep anything of the present, so that it is not or is impossible>>.

The disappearence of the image that exposed our retina precedes the creation of the mnemonic image: the <<being nothing>> creeps between these two moments of perception, and it is a kind of astronomic black hole, of empty interval, of pause, which only belongs to our mind.

What is Provino interested in is not the Tabula Rasa, anyway, the not being; but what comes before and after: the moment of the desappearance and the coming back of the image as a memory. For this reason his pictures emerge from a breaking shadow, from a lightening background, and they are never descriptions but <<Auras>>, which, having surrounded the object, are able to suggest it without losing their trasparence, their surrounding concavity. In this way Provino can work with space without using volume, is able to intertwine cavities without drawing bodies. Internal space becomes, as for organic architecture, the essential datum to compose his condition of being.

<<Among the great things that are found within us, the being of nothing is huge. This lives in time, and spreads its arms through the past and the future, with which occupies all the past creations and the ones to come, of nature as of the animals, and owns nothing of the indivisible present. This does not extend over the being of anything>>.In this way Leonardo gets deeper on his thoughts about nothing and offers us other hints to follow Provino in his explorations, dark explorations in which there is not an universal light, no rays coming from a definite source, there is an intrinsic brightness that has been captured in the footprints, in the returning of things.

The present light has gone away, and what remains is the riddle of making past and future communicate between them, saving them from the invisible but without depriving them of that admirable obscure component that is <<The being nothing>>, this huge thing that is among those that <<are found within us>>.

Provino's latest painting, following this clue of Leonardo's, gives me the feeling of a moment of deep and involving, though pessimistic, research carried out with the help of a finely mature technique, a moment depicting an old anguish only improved by the very act of doing. << The water in which you can put your hand and the one already flown, and the one that is going to pass by: so time is>>. Once again painting is pushed and gain depth by way of a feeling of Time.

Paolo Portoghesi

Back to top