A pomegranate, a walnut or a peach, a beard and then another, some crumpled paper…
A search for hyperrealistic clefts as a repair from the Sicilian heat to be found in the shadowy alleys of down-town Rome, or maybe as a shelter from the inconsistencies of life to be found in the peace of composed objects and in the silence imposed on faces and gazes and bodies, coated as if to grant
them quiet and privacy.
A gaze piercing all creases and giving everything and everyone, including oneself, relief in the calm of reality, which is made of cracks, of bruised peels and porous skins, of the rugosity of nutshells and of scars on the cheekbones, of the dissonant and stinging notes of wrinkled materials, of gold and jewels that, apparently splendid, only help to distract and protect.
Covering in order to dissect, to elaborate, to better observe and stretch, and thus to restore and reunite.
Seldom really veiled, subjects find themselves exposed in the folds of their shells.
Seeing what is cracked and wanting to recompose it.
The identity of the manifestation, in the sacred triad symbolized by walnuts, scattered only for a second in their rolling, but never really hidden by the external veil of a wrap, since each of them is entitled to its own shadow.
The unity, set on white canvas, of a pomegranate declined as if in the four times of life.
Searching for reality, for accuracy, not because they are unscathed, regular and superficially perfect, but because that is Reality, imperfect. And captured by a universal, intimate pietas, so that we can get restituted to what is true and get supported, once regenerated.
And then, the detail as calmness, the signature of those works.
Never an abrupt emotion caught and displayed, or and excess, a clash of colours and materials just to impress or please the eye, or an unexpected element self-complacently thrown on the canvas.
And then again, his recounting.
His recounting not of the subjects, or, even less, of himself through them.
Recounting time, in its innumerable and yet immutable instants, so close to the identity and the substance of each element portrayed. Recounting the unity, even if with three faces oriented in different
directions.
Recounting also our contingent time, ill-treated by coarse bread paper or refracted by a cellophane film, contortions of light in lieu of contortions of life, new reflections and resulting fears.
And then, the ancillary meticulousness of the work of the artist, which becomes a recommendation for patience and tolerance as means to get back from the details and incidents of everything to wholeness.
Also, often non-direct gazes, because it is the ease of the time of each observer’s thoughts that details refer to.
And when on the contrary a gaze captures us, it is as if it wanted to never let us go and follow us almost within ourselves, where another image of self appears, in the transcendent blue.
And finally the balance, which revives, simple and evident, in an intentionally, ascetically orange fruit: intact, primal, normal, eternal.
“Hyper-realistic”, as a matter of fact.
What is real as what is un-fore-seen by us.
That is why it helps, sometimes, to be seen.
Nicola Castelli