landscape with garbage

 oil on canvas, 80 x 60 cm.

I’m afraid that I have never seen in my whole life a place that was totally devoid of garbage or waste. Like the majority of people nowadays, I have traveled quite a lot, and in all the places where I've been, even in apparently pristine landscapes, such as high mountain paths or natural parks, there is always the memory of some garbage. Maybe hidden, perhaps barely visible and half buried, faded by the sun and worn out from the weather, mainly plastic, now part of nature.

In the countryside of southern Italy, especially in Puglia, just digging in the ground it is very easy to uncover relics of ancient Greek civilization: pieces of amphorae, shards of pottery, coins. It's too easy to say that this was a refined civilization, so that we still consider its waste like works of art, while ours is a barbarian society that submerged the planet of trash. Will we arrive at the point of saying that the difference is only quantitative?... Will it happen, in a near future, that we will come to replace the ruins of antiquity with the scraps of our consumerism? Original available for sale:

http://www.saatchiart.com/art/Painting-landscape-with-garbage/46606/2715756/view

red flowers

from the series “Botany’s notebook”, oil and pencil on paper. 30 x 44 cm

https://www.artfinder.com/product/red-flowers-7ef5/

bombed cities

"Bombing Turin" and "Bombing Milan". ORIGINAL ARTWORKS SOLD.

http://www.saatchiart.com/art/Drawing-bombing-Turin/46606/2552970/view

http://www.saatchiart.com/art/Drawing-bombing-Milan/46606/2560258/view

From the series “Code”, oil and graphite pencil on paper, 30 x 30 cm.

A map is an imprint, a sign of man in the landscape. An alien intelligence, observing our cities from the great distances of the space, could interpret them as the characters of an alphabet, sort of messages, a code of signs, each one different from the other, each with its own meaning and its own syntax. This hypothetical alien presence may not even realize that these cities have a purpose and a function, which are the product of the way we have adapted to live on this planet, but it could engage in an attempt to interpret this unknown language, identifying the alphabet and associating to each character a precise meaning. We will still be able to understand and share this new meanings, or will they have lost any sense for us?

The idea of painting the bombed cities has born as a series inside the series. It comes from my direct experience; in fact, Turin was strongly bombed during the Second World War and the sign of that bombings still remains in some parts of the city, where the destroyed buildings haven't been replaced, leaving a hole in the urban tissue.

the red star

oil on canvas, 90 x 70 cm. Available for sale:

http://www.saatchiart.com/art/Painting-red-star/46606/2767950/view

Franz Kafka never moved from his Prague. For the setting of his novel "Amerika", he probably used the notions  that he took from the newspapers and fron his literary knowledge. Then he filled the gaps left by that informations with his imagination, inventing a really comprehensive and credible setting. Today he wouldn’t have this problem, because the network provides us with detailed and substantial information on anything. The universal knowledge is available to all. And everyone, sooner or later run into the same two problems: this information is too much, we do not need it! (till  the point that often we remain submerged and we do not know anymore what we were looking for). And then, how do we verify its authenticity? The virtual reproduction of the real world offered by the internet is so plausible, to make hard this verification. And often that virtual world is more attractive than the reality, to the point that this verification is not so important. Is this news true? Is this picture real? Or is it a montage? No matter, as long as it catches our attention. And this red star? Wasn’t it on the domes of the Kremlin? What is it doing on a skyscraper in New York? No matter, it's good enough ...