He could easily not have graduated in Law, if what Lorenzo wanted to do was wander here and there gathering little scales of ferric hydroxide from metals and then using them to create collages on canvases. His technical explorations were triggered by this “discovery”, corresponding to a complex formula, which enables him to artistically create chromatic situations that alter, not the colour of the rust itself but that of the canvas it is placed on. The result is a lengthy series of canvases devoted to the exhaustion of oxidation which, generated on an iron surface and then removed from it, enters the canvas in the form of collage to explore a new chromatic vitality, functional to the new experience. There was a day on which Lorenzo discovered the various shades of the oxidation on the pilings, and detached the various layers of rust and took them to his studio. He then broke up the flakes of rust  and spread this new material over the canvases, as if he were using a brush or a spatula; and so he went on. Embedded in the rust is the demise of its own metal, the agony of the selfsame material, and the artist using it senses all the weight of the time that fractures his present and even the space that offers to accommodate it.

However it is only fair to say that when Lorenzo distributes the rust over the canvas he uses it in the same way as normal collage. He covers the surface of the canvas pursuing lyrical promptings that he presents not only in relation to the shattered and attached pieces – like any painter who uses his brush to apply bits of colour to the surface – but also in relation to the play of colour of the planes, breaking them up in line with harmonious spatial relations and creating graphic assonance between the empty spaces and the fragmented colours. His informel is his deliberate way of allowing nature to shatter; each face or object invents new spaces, lacerating the rust that settles into flowers or embroideries, so that the white breathes intermittently on the canvas or the blue is mirrored in the gold of the rust. At times the russet gold of the surface reaches as far as the long juncture that embraces the wall, or to the rosette that circularly stains the green. The matter vibrates with such tension and malaise that it seems that – despite appearances – the world is in dissolution: as far back as the 1950s  the inventions of Pollock and the American dripping emerged, materialising the miracle of an emotion represented as matter, almost as if the unconscious merged with the rationality of the invention. Now, “with Lofilo” everything appears at once more precise and more lyrical, his agile mode of melding painting with play illuminates the creative act with a secret playful joy: dolls or sacks or acorns or rust come freely to life, through projects devised even with the sick and prisoners, almost as if a surge of ethical vitality marked the schemata of the personal creation.
Over the years Filomeni’s models alter their form, they recede from realistic schemata to morph into lyrical and dynamic forms, with the addition of photos and paper figures; with conventional cuttings capable of ousting the “winter from [intellectual] hibernation”; the “hand of God” descends upon the original forms of a technicised world; the abstract “becoming” a serene horizontal scattering; the “cow” an essential abandonment of dynamism and plastic perspective; the graphics of the “shrew” grasp not the externals of the woman but her inner tangle and its pigment evolution; the “chequered life” of 2004 seeks to link up with his probabilistic adventure to posit a dialogue with man; every square is the gesture repeated to infinity on the chessboard of the world, linking up with the repetitivity of the everyday in its dramatic dying.

The pastels and the glue, the gold dust and the acrylic are thus juxtaposed with the bent iron and the colour, added to attempt the creative venture that blends intellect and matter to achieve a harmony between colours, pigments and iron: all notes unleashed from Filomeni’s whimsical score to aspire to the originality of pictorial and also sculptural song. The case that the “lawyer-artist” is pleading with the anti-imagination is considerably more arduous than that he would have had to tackle in the tribunals: taking fantasy to court is always a daring enterprise, particularly because there can be no appeal. But there are still many hearings to come, and as many victories.

Prof. Dino Carlesi

 

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