Continuing the description of some paintings in my show titled "Urban Inconceivable".
In "E' Vietato L'Accesso - Propieta' Privata"
we see a scene of almost Brechtian dimensions. Set upon a background of clean,
sterile apartment buildings immersed in the hazy atmosphere of a typical Florentine
smog-laden day, we witness as if superimposed, an absurd yet humanly
scaled collection of little sheds and constructions topped with
miscellaneous, random patchworks of corrugated tin. Nearby in the fields,
as if anonymous serfs, people are bent over, toiling. Shockingly large in
the foreground is a manufactured "No Trespassing" sign upon which "Private
Property"is hand-scribbled. Rust-worn and creepy, it appears a bit like a
modern version of Dante's warning: "All hope abandon, ye who enter
here..." Yet I observe this scene not with cynical superiority,
but rather with melancholic empathy for these people who inhabit it, for
they are the salt of the earth. Who knows what stories they would tell if
they could... one imagines old traditional tales: of the ancestors, of the
war, of other times... the last vestiges of a sapient agrarian culture set
within an urban sea...
There is also however the humorist, the commentator, the
philosopher in me, who enjoys telling jokes and observing little foibles of the
society which surrounds me. Without malice, tempered by compassion, but
most definitely playful… note the large sign in the foreground with an Italian
orthographic mistake: "propieta" instead of "proprietà", that I reproduced on purpose.