Aldo Aytano: Critique
Daniele Luti reviews Aldo Aytano (2004)
The works by Aldo Aytano exhibited at the "Murabilia", a show that is a meta-naturalistic poetical reading of the tree circled city of Lucca, almost a homage to the town that lies buried in its circle of architectural aquarium, all share something in common: the tree. This is the element that typifies the inclusion of an artist in a show that sells plants and flowers, the result of years of gardeners' patient trial and experiment, not pictures. The tree is the constant subject of study, but the artist never paints it individually as the only feature in the painting but in groups, in the volume of the maquis or thicket. A growing incomplete tree like a multiplication of itself in a variety of forms that can represent the intellectual imagination and the verticality of thought and also the static quality of the human body, like a decoded poetic metaphor.
The subjects depicted are trees, woods, forests and light. Having set aside his initial natural self-consciousness, the viewer who wants to study the paintings to understand them should know that the focus of the works is light. It is light that gives form, credibility and substance to matter. A body, a form are made to come to life, are saved from their death from lack of movement and imagination only by the light that usually spreads along the limits of the distant horizon towards the cosmos and the infinite. A brainwave, a breath of dawn air that, as the artist recalls, "...is that of the early risers to go to look for mushrooms in the wood when they are waiting for the dawn in the wood or when they linger until dusk almost in the pretence of having lost their way ". In many of Aldo Aytano’s works there is the feeling you have in autumn evenings when the light seems to linger for ever before night suddenly falls, in the metaphysical darkness of our becoming stars.
A small painting called "Ultime luci su Sant’Anna" (Last rays of light at Sant’Anna) describes exactly this sensation in the chestnut woodlands at dusk when we see the last rays of the sun before it sets. The light is still warm, intense (summer that absorbs everything and transforms the world of objects into a projection of shadows), this is what "Tempesta di luce a Riva Verde" describes. Large scale, thickly applied colour, rich in line and colour, rather arrogant because of the aggressiveness of its concept, it captures the moment when returning home from a day at the seaside the pine trees seem to wave to us to tell the artist and me and us that we are going away only to go back there where perhaps we have never been.
When Aldo talked to me about this painting, he told me a story that, in his opinion, is the real reason for focusing on figures that sometimes dance and at other times seem frozen in a heroic struggle with the light:
"...I drew inspiration for the shapes of the trees from the forks of roughly cut sticks made by the people of Burchina Faso and Zaire. They represent the spirits of the healer and are hung at the entrance to the huts when someone is ill. They are able to destroy, wipe out the disease". In his studio Aldo’s collection of masks, sculpture and other tribal figures also includes these wooden ‘spirits’ whose shape and texture are very similar to the trees in his paintings.
"Baie di Asciaghju" was painted recently, this summer in Corsica. This is a scene that is repeated but that, from year to year is updated and always seems to give us a new way of looking at things. The artist, by now master of form, develops substance in an almost musical crescendo of brushstrokes and finger marks that vaporize it creating a wonderful colourful effect. We are drawn into that dimension that Nietzsche and D'Annunzio call the well of the unconscious, the hour of Pan, the vertigo of sinking. Form disappears dissolving into the natural surroundings and becoming part of the scorching sandy shore of the flight of the pine trees towards the coast, of the cirri and the deep, clear sea. The only remaining trace of man is the echo of his voice before turning into silence hanging on the quaver of a note that never seems to die.
Daniele Luti reviews Aldo Aytano (1989)
As is immediately discernable his favourite subject is the Tuscan landscape between the area around Lucca and the Pisan Maremma with new aspirations towards the mouth of the River Arno, almost an archaeological memory of ancient carmi. However the journey that is suggested here is not a psychological reading, rich in a concrete reality but a nihilist journey into the real ego in the search for primitive feelings, suggestions stolen many years ago perhaps and jealously guarded in our temple of the mind. I have noted strong signs of a Tuscany reinterpreted from Corot: the magic of woodlands and mountains, of the world of the eighteenth century novel, that of Fucini, and also Boito, Camillo (one can see I tre romei, and Baciale il piè). I found the courage to be provincial not from ideological choice, but also so as to stand back from centrality, to live on the perimeter, the only place from where one can identify the core of life: the periphery as workplace a tangible trace of construction and loss. The moment is everywhere in the stones, in the grass, in words.
To set out on a voyage of discovery, or to set out only to go back to the place you set out from. Drawing inspiration from the rocks, the quarries (the caves of high esoteric philosophy) the derelict cottages, architectural phantoms of an active resistance to the decline, even figuratively speaking, of our times, it struck me that the only form of freedom is imprisonment that protects you from life and introduces the rules that protect you from fate. From here there is not just the hurdle of a design or a Sign between the self and the other, between the ego and the world, but also the double movement between confession and secrecy, between concealment and revelation. Indeed once has a technical labyrinth (modification of behaviour) to mislead, to imagine a truth, to divide oneself into two halves in the shadows, in the light and shade of the crevices. I could say that two things have struck me: firstly, the complete absence of man thus making the silence of nature even more conceptual, and secondly the prudent absence of the artist from his pictures that makes it seem as if he has been painted by his pictures. The artist is not interested in the figure, in the material, but in the footprints, in the design – the quarries, the abandoned houses are representations of "constructions", of human geometry that takes on meaning only after the flight towards inexistence, only after that the presence became absolute again following a short break. These absences can be detected from a technical point of view in the trembling pencil strokes. With a little practice it is easy to render the idea of movement but it is extremely unusual and complex to capture the tremor that is intuitable in certain natural conditions (states of mind), in certain reflective moments.
Some works, perhaps those that disturbed me the most, reminded me of the communication trenches along the lanes that go from Mount Nibbio and Mount Voltraio, going down to the Era Valley, I can't recall now whether towards Molino or the cave of Africo, but anyway going towards the road that marks the area of Volterra from the intricate maze of hills that roll towards Siena and the area of Florence, the inlets, the pink cottages, a few old traces still remaining of the lost peasant life. Here, when I was a teenager, I used to go to blend my feelings with the pieces of landscape and I invented romantic (sentimental) titles for the drawings that, from time to time, I cut out from the whole just for me, for one of my perfect exhibitions – the the Ferroni's house, the tower of the fires, the solitary sailing boat. Many of these works, that I conjured up at certain moment as symbols of my often problematic relation with life, almost always lacking any connection with the landscape, like the stage for my innermost thoughts, of my deepest reflections, those that do not represent the "political" seasons but are in someway related to the mechanism of escaping from yourself. I could have superimposed them over Aldo's drawings that appeared to me so much more perfect and of greater spontaneous elegance, of greater sophisticated and knowledgeable structure they seemed to me. One mysterious constant is the complete absence of roads, of paths, sometimes barely hinted at, as an example of the person who moves away from the subject to go out of the picture, to achieve the correct distance, the viewing point. And this both viewing the area around Volterra a jewel in the crown of ages past, and portraying the stretch of sea that goes from Marina di Pisa to Leghorn, like a sparrow-hawk gliding in the watery sky.
Guglielmo Petroni reviews Aldo Aytano
In these days of "excessive" interpretation of real life and artistic language it is rare to find an artist who expresses a graceful delicacy in the form and representation of life. It is this particular exploration of tones and forms that are transfigured without being distorted that makes these landscapes charming and intellectually irresistible.
The first impression of essentiality and sincerity that arise from the subtle use of particularly charming tones, as well as from a softening of forms, appear to be the result of spontaneous creativity. But it takes little to see that, on the contrary, we are in the presence of a well-thought out carefully executed idea that does not, however, outshine the virtuosity it takes to realise these special and original images.
It is significant that a young man expresses himself at this level, by avoiding those forced interpretations of transition that are nearly always controversial towards a recovery of some rarely found values. Aytano guides us in the quest for that necessary equilibrium that can be found precisely through young committed avant-garde artists. They turn their backs on intellectual distortions to take us back to the emotions that the world and nature once more reclaim and that only the reinvention of the secret of every natural beauty may may translate for us with a suitable language for new times.
In my opinion the reason these images are so appealing is because of the inner delicacy of the depiction of landscapes that are similar to each other, because of the artist's confident realization and knowledge of the meaning his studies may acquire, of what individuality they may express at a time when distortions are the goal. The latter, whilst achieving considerable results prevent us from understanding that relaxing meditation that they inspire.
The fact that the paintings are of hills and mountains in Tuscany might also lead to influences from further afield, from Tuscan art. There is a faint hint of some Classical art as well and if they arise spontaneously they must to some extent have some meaning. But apart from these it can be concluded that we can expect Aytano to develop a reflective modernity and intelligent finesse.
Mario Bucci reviews Aldo Aytano (December 1978)
Before painting or drawing and artist must love the subject, landscape, figure he wants to portray and study and observe it with infinite dedication. If not, the result may well be a correct painting an exact drawing from the technical point of view but it will not be a work of art, a multi-faceted response, the fruit of a subjective state of mind.
Aldo Aytano may be young but has given us the first experiments of his studies. Some of the works painted several years ago while very well-executed and composed with clear structure and using impeccable technique still betrayed the early passions and are almost instinctive but lacking the filter, the detachment of a more rational, self-critical artist. They show evidence of the Post-Cubist structure of those who have studied, as everyone has, Picasso and his school, the dynamic synthesis that recalls the Futurists, magical figurations rich in symbolism reflecting the Expressionists of the first decade of the century.
But he matured quickly and signs of hardness, geometric structures, diagonal lines that were used as a basis and were too strongly emphasised have been toned down. He has softened the subject that was decorative and intense, that of the youthful voice, that avoids shade and chiaroscuro. He mastered tones, the experience that results from the early sorrows, disappointments that make a man mature. He is not influenced by the tense, relentless atmosphere today's world and art is obsessed with, restless and torn apart by doubt, by absurdity, that is lost in hiding the truth in complicated hieroglyphics, in cold rational mathematical theorems.
He took refuge in his poetical world, in the mountain in which he believes, that he has climbed yard by yard step by step, with the same fresh fascinated gaze as on his first stirring discovery, like a child on the beach with a shell. The soft rounded outline of the Apuane, the indistinct and blurred or sharp crystal clear outlines of the two Panie, of the "Uomo Morto" (Dead Man), the undulating, more open crest of Le Foci, are for him like the curves of a human body, the warm perfumed curves of a woman observed and caressed with a slow glance while she slumbering; far too important to be betrayed by art that smacks of the abstract.
Poetical landscapes decisively portrayed, with a confident feeling for structure: skilful gradation, harmonious backdrops, the silhouette of the mountains that range from intense greens, fresh in the foreground, to the prized blues, almost violet tones of the mountain crests in the distance, sharply silhouetted against transparent skies stretching out as if they were made of tissue paper. Scenes that are appreciated in all their tones, in all their poetical aspects before being painted: a rocky recess, a dense clump of trees in the dusk, a house or the light observed as dusk slowly creeps in.
They recall the landscapes of old Japanese or Chinese prints, the outline of Mount Fujiiama covered in snow, with the red sunset or a dreamy dawn, colours that are rarely actually seen in nature and that immediately become artificial when transferred onto canvas. Maybe they are similar because they share a love of nature, the admiration for, the mystery surrounding these events. But the subject is different, completely modern and personal, essential, rich, made of flesh and blood, sensual and precious that adds flesh to the precise lines of the structure, with the life blood of the colours that are juxtaposed so they almost clash, recalling some Divisionist combinations: green and violet; green and blue; pink and green; white and green; grey and green.
Aldo's wonderful drawings also illustrate his coherence, highlighting one of the details in this spiritual landscape: a seemingly humble detail, a cottage with a group of trees surrounding it, the outline of a group of houses, an isolated crossroads in the chequer board landscape of the countryside of Lucca, become precious formulated from a sign, that, while being based on expert ability, takes on an entirely poetical value, as in one of Morandi's engravings.
When he tackles the figure his observations are more ironic, with more attention as to structure but also leaning towards the grotesque, at expression: always a human analysis, of a character, a situation without allowing himself to sing out loud as in his landscapes, but with the knowledge of a worse destiny burdening the shoulders of mankind.