Dimensions: 17x12 cm
Pages: 48
"Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others."
(Jonathan Swift)
The starting point is a real image, mainly a landscape or something morphologically concrete, which may be felt and therefore shared. This is later reduced to its essential elements – structure, colour, emotion.
Abstraction is a philosophical process, a mental procedure which isolates some elements and puts them out of context. The word comes from the latin abstrahĕre, which literally means "pull away", so "take out". In painting, this concept underlines a distance from the mimetical and naturalistic model of representation of reality. This reconsideration of the perceptive system moves from the sensorial dimension to the mental and sentimental one.
In abstract art, the description of the world is not only or anymore the product of an optic stimulation, it becomes rather the result of an intellectual, impulsive and emotional elaboration. The world is literally filtered through the perception of the individual and it is transformed into something different, a synthetic visual structure made by the deconstruction and reconstruction of reality.
This is the pictorial language by Paolo Bini. This artist created an original working method, combining a formal analysis of reality with the emotional content of the image.
The starting point is a real image, mainly a landscape or something morphologically concrete, which may be felt and therefore shared. This is later reduced to its essential elements - structure, colour, emotion - and then inserted in a basically Cartesian organisation: gummed-paper modules put side by side to arrange vertical and horizontal diagrams.
Each stripe is painted and applied to the support, a canvas or a panel, as a singular grammatical element of a wider period, the phrase of a language built step by step.
The modules, distributed by a precise order, cover a homogeneous area and develop a complete structure. The result is the combination of actions which, in reality, become the synthesis of different languages, from the Lyrical abstraction to Neo Geo, from Minimalism to Conceptual art via Informalism and Action painting.
Paolo Bini uses different methods. He reduces the distances between traditions once opposed. So he creates unpredictable connections between geometrical and standard structures, pictorial actions and gestures complete a dense web of weaves. The mind goes immediately to Piero Dorazio's or Mario Nigro's chromatic grid structures.
You can feel from the beginning that in Bini the dialogue between painting and space is much more urgent. In the work by this artist, there is a plastic tension produced not only by the adhesive tapes, through which he moves the work's surface, adding a mottled and sparkling skin that breaks the regular rhythm of the horizontal and vertical sequences.
This tension is also given by going beyond the traditional edges of painting, through actions which extend his pictorial modules to an objectual dimension.
It could be described as a lyrical version of pattern painting, ambiguously suspended between the logic precision of analytical art and the chromatic and irrational explosions of abstract expressionism. It is also an operative platform, where the two main artistic waves of uniconic art of the XXth century ideally meet: the cold and rational and the hot and emotional.
At the core of everything there is colour. Colour translates the emotional geography of the landscapes seen and lived by the artist during his many trips in the Mediterranean, South Africa and continental Europe. It looks like a stratification of memories, a juxtaposition of temporal layers recognized as single memories, independent impressions put back together by the artist for a wide and more complex vision. There is something more than simply producing emotions through an optic perception. Beyond the horizon line of his rebuilt landscapes, between the orthogonal layouts of his smooth visions, lies the most mysterious enigma ever, the never answered question regarding the deepest nature of mankind. In this way, Bini modifies the experience of painting, not only as a bridgebetween phenomenal entities and mental constructs, the world of forms and the world of concepts, but also as a perceptual doorway between the visible and invisibile realities, the vision filtered by the retina and the image joining the observer's mind and consciousness.