When color becomes symbol and poetry
Once, the artist who expressed his inspiration through painting was not considered merely a decorator, but a kind of shaman who gave life to the imaginative and fantastic universe of the group to which he belonged. In the Renaissance, Marsilio Ficino and Giordano Bruno framed the role of the painter as someone who performed true magic with the symbols of Hellenic mythology; he who painted was the one who realized the imago, who knew how to make visible the invisible energy of the Neoplatonic idea. Thus, the artist increasingly became the one who gave a face and symbol to feelings, to the aspirations of the individual or the group, to the deeds of men, to memories so they would become history and overcome time and the fear of death.
And painting therefore constituted a veritable narrative made of illustrations that decorated the cave and then the tent, up to frescoing the palace, the temple, and eventually the church. The painter became important because he gave visibility to the invisible, creating the image for what could only be imagined, and for those who could only remember and fantasize.
The oral tradition, through images, thus took on a profound, pedagogical, and cathartic meaning, and the community grew around the values of the hero, the saint, and the anecdote that unveiled the life of a person elected as a model for all: ethical, civic, and religious values were passed down. Thus, history was born.
Over time, the figure of the artist has not changed much; the means of delivering the artwork have changed, the function of the artwork has obviously changed, as well as how civil society relates to it. The economy of art has also changed; the patron no longer exists, nor does the regime artist (though I could argue this last concept at length until I contradict myself). However, it is undeniable that the painter marks, with his work, the symbols of changing times and passing time. The artist captures the mood of society, whether exalting its glories or denouncing its flaws. In the artwork, one reads a universe that is the profound image, the truest soul of the time in which one lives. The artist is, even today, the shaman who gives shape, sign, color, and music to feelings, sensations, emotions, desires for freedom, down to anger and hope. The history of art is, in fact, nothing more than the study of how a man has been able to be original in expressing with inspiration what many think, live, and feel deep down, but, being occupied with matters other than the application of art, they leave it to the artist to give form and visibility to the invisible.
Sandro Bastioli fits precisely into this context, both for the works he now produces and for his artistic journey. It would be reductive, banal, and inaccurate to relegate Bastioli's art to mere figurativism. Certainly, what Sandro Bastioli represents with rare technical virtuosity is real figure, but the depiction, the 'imago' that the overt image hides, and what he seeks are quite another matter.
This artist began as a landscape painter; his rural scenes recalled the nineteenth-century pre-Impressionist artists. Mountain landscapes, woods, dusty roads, and serene skies, a perfect technique highlighted in the refined chromaticism, in the careful construction of the drawing, and in the application of the material, which is as light as fine dust settling delicately on the canvas. Even in the landscapes, which I now recall as I observe his latest production, one could foresee an inspiration that is not that of someone making a real representation of what is seen. What inspires Bastioli is the elaboration of the symbol that summarizes the memory, the life that passes, the time that marks things and needs images so that it remains in memory.
Sandro Bastioli uses colors and chooses forms just as the poet uses rhymes and metaphors. The stones are tiles prepared by a man who is no longer here; he left his mark so that others would remember and, in some way, conquer time and tear the veil of the 'great consoler'. His images are rusted doors, iron hinges locking wooden doors, lashed by the wind and adorned by lichens. Cosmatesque floors and walls corroded by lime and splashes of paint, interplays of shadow that shift the iridescent colors of materials worked by men. This is the genius of this artist: to give shape through painting to what is the foundation of the memory that fixes itself in the matter worked by man and by time.
The female nudes themselves are presences of beauty, of thought that is about to become poetry with colors; the feminine beauty that Bastioli paints is a sort of antidote against the oblivion of the apathy that threatens every age, every era.
In Sandro Bastioli's artistic journey, colors have become rarefied, delicate; every painting seems like a butterfly's wing, impalpable and untouchable. The color does not mark, it reveals the subject and enhances the sensation of the rough as well as the smooth, the ancient, the porous, the chipped, and everything tastes of beauty. His doors are gateways toward the universe of feelings, and the painting gives reason and rationality to what is unreachable and invisible. Doors, windows, shutters, and locks which, even if painted shut, are passages of someone who, like Bastioli, emerged from the 1950s with the hope and vigor of the youth who lived the post-war period and listened to the anxieties and yearnings of the parents who had lived through the war.
Sandro Bastioli is not merely a skilled decorative painter; he is a true poet who lives on the love for life and the love for Love. His idea of beauty fears getting lost in the meanders of a blind and vacuous modernity; he is afraid that the figures populating his inner world might fade in the noise of the ignorant figures populating reality shows. Thus, with his magic of painting, this artist fixes lost things, objects worn out from too much use that carry the flavor of memories and melancholy; he photographs and reworks things to be forgotten, destined for abandonment or fit for landfills and the incinerator. This artist, like the painters of the past, gives visibility to the invisible and image to the imaginary, because only poets like him know how to use the colors of feelings, sensations, and emotions, and to give reason, to us who do not know how to paint, of what we feel inside and cannot have an image if not through the heart and the colors of Sandro Bastioli.