An artist is one who by means of his intelligence and his physical and emotional senses captures both the incidentals of the daily lives of his fellow men and the space and time of their pasts. This capacity is profound and burns within us all, within individuals and society at large. It is continuous – it has a beginning, an hour, a “now”. An artist is one who makes others aware and cannot therefore divorce himself from the concerns of his time, no matter how minor: the more authentic the artist, the more easily he can grasp the truth, describe it, share it.
As long as there is man there will always be the artist. The forms, manner and trends within art may change but art is born of man, and to fail to recognize this is to deprive man of the fundamental means for his own self discovery. While the possibility of an art work being produced collectively cannot be categorically excluded, I personally believe this is not possible. The artist is deeply immersed within his world, he identifies with it, and yet he is alone when it comes to listening to his own heart. Being alone is not an exclusive characteristic to the genius, in the stereotypical sense; this inner isolation is part of the human experience, a universal human truth.
Within my paintings there is always man and his history. I do not speak only of those paintings of human figures, for I have painted landscapes, I have painted the earth and I have painted “suns”, and even within these there is man. For man is not only made of these things, he is a part of these things and his is a continuous relationship with nature. Nature gave him life, indeed man is “nature”. The key to unravelling the mystery of man’s true self resides in a deep understanding of nature which is itself the world, the world in which he finds himself.
I have painted water, the gardens of lagoons. I have painted the coal sellers of Venice and the women of Vercelli at work in their paddy fields. I have painted the “deltas” of the river Po and also the lands of Friuli. This rich terrain, the rocks and pebbles of the Tagliamento and the “suns” which seem to arise from its depths. I have painted “obstacles”, metaphorical and real: physical fences built by man’s own hand as well as the psychological barriers that society itself has constructed. I have painted faces, the faces of the Friulani, battered and torn by tragedies old and new. Not only have I come to understand that form can dispose of the object when it is either dispensable or when it becomes a barrier to expression, to emotional discourse – but I have also come to realize that form can restore the object at other moments in time, and that while the means may be different, the conclusion reached may in fact be the same. This is not a contradiction or an inconsistency: rather it is a means to claiming full control and dominion over form, and prevents the artist from being lured into the traps and snares of cultural trends and fads. And yet, whether I find myself in one “moment” or the other, I wish to be, and always will, a realist, concrete and forever aware.

Albino Lucatello (Note, 1978)

 

ranslated by Amanda M. Hunter