The first thing that Lorenzo Filomeni showed me the first time I visited his studio was a box full of rust. Very excited, he took out a flake here and a fragment there and, touching them fondly, he pointed out to me the amazing details of surface and colour. Delighted with this recent discovery, he was already imagining new works, “pictures” that he would construct with what he had gathered close to the pier of Marina di Pietrasanta.
What was Lorenzo before his encounter with rust? A questing soul. Having turned to painting relatively late, after studies apparently taking him in a totally different direction of lifestyle, he set out buoyantly to traverse the variegated world of contemporary art, free from prejudice of any kind and above all fearlessly. A self-taught career that rendered him free right from his first experiences of testing, or rather putting himself to the test, in various directions. His map was colour; to this and with it he fused his impetuous fantasy and the result was an amazing eclecticism of images: some decisively resolved, others staggering in their freshness, yet others stages in a genuinely wide-ranging apprenticeship.  The Milan in which much of this “journey” took place was far from stingy in offering him the opportunity to see much of what is happening in modern art, while at the same time allowing him to meet in the flesh, rather than in books, those who appear to be his tutelary deities, the lodestone on his path: Lucio Fontana and Alberto Burri. The conviction that there exists an intrinsic aesthetic significance in what is discarded, the courage to attack matter, the ingenuousness of the gaze in observing it, the serenity to let oneself be led by it without fearing the consequences. This is what appears to have happened up to now and is also the harbinger for his future.
Alongside it is the strong echo of the COBRA experience and of graffiti writing, and again of the trace left in contemporary youthful expression by a sort of “creative rage”. Examples of this are works such as Il cane di fiori (The dog of flowers), Lazzaro (Lazarus), Bimba stellata (Starry child), Autoritratto (Self-portrait),  Mano di Dio (Hand of God), Colonne di lupi (Columns of wolves), Aspettando (Waiting),  Uomo… (Man…). These are works that vary greatly in language (he himself on his website – lofilo.com – has split his production into eight different categories), but all indicative of the numerous stages on what we defined above as his “journey”, all distinctly different but brought together by the quest for the expressiveness that the matter – whether as mere colour or as the collage of disparate elements – is capable of assuming.
Then came the rust, and paradoxically I could also say then came “peace”: not that the rust stemmed his vehemence, on the contrary, it simply channelled his energy in precisely the same way as a mountain torrent that finally finds its riverbed.
The first works are marked by a surface totally covered with pieces of iron, almost like the “reconstruction” of an area that time has corroded and shattered. They appear before our eyes like a cloak of fallen leaves, visions of the undergrowth in late autumn woods, redolent of  ancient chestnut paths. These early works almost seem to be the fruit of a sort of acknowledgement of the material by the artist; he looks at it and listens to it, wary of violating what he sees as the harmony of the piece of iron that has reached his hands in shards, almost as if he wished to reconstruct it. Then a greater confidence appears  to free the rust of its past and Lorenzo of his “stupor” in the face of this expressive wealth of the matter, and gradually the space of the canvas begins to dilate, the fragments of iron obey new forces and the dynamism progressively takes over the process of construction of the image. Observing one of the “rust” paintings is rather like being in front of a fire, the fragments take on the hypnotic force of the flames and we find ourselves tracing out their routes, here segments, vectors tending to the exterior, here semicircular lines that trace out orbits, the sky or marine currents, the surface of the water or the air, or again as if the fragments of rust meshed to portray the waves of energy invisible to the human gaze that traverse our atmospheres.

Lorenzo had been seeking the rust for some time; in the previous works we can see this “discovery” in his way of spreading the colour, here with a spatula, there with his hands, or again with various media used as “pads”, in the mixed techniques exploiting collages of different materials: every single gesture evoked the attempt to create a vibrant surface. Examples of this are, for instance: “Ombra”2 (“Shadow” 2), Zeroquattro08 (Zerofour08), Volto giapponese (Japanese face), Individuo (Individual), Senza titolo (Untitled), Vista di un cammino (View of a chimney), Senza titolo-Applico e deapplico (Untitled-I apply and disapply), Voglia di ballare (Wanting to dance).  But possibly the most emblematic example is Il cane di fiori (The dog of flowers) where the petals both make up the figure and at the same time mark the space of the canvas in precisely the same way as the iron fragments do now. The very colour of the flower is even similar to the rust; this is a work from 2003, approximately four years prior to the “rusts”.

Speaking of contemporary art, I have quite frequently found myself referring to a sort of New Humanism, and these works of Filomeni’s appear to confirm this theory of mine. What I mean is that, at present, in the face of the civil disaster, the ethical debacle that appears to assail us, many artistic expressions seem to be increasingly oriented towards the quest for and retrieval of a spirituality that, despite everything, persists in human beings and in what they produce. And the more the expressiveness appears chaotic and violent, or saturated with found materials, the more the aesthetic outcome, and hence the ultimate meaning too, denote what is instead a positive judgement on humanity. Attributing beauty to the “rejects” in itself means demonstrating that a capacity for recovery exists, that it is possible to reconvert, reconstruct. The rehabilitation of “waste” (for example in the work Uomo (Man) we have the retrieval of the bonnet of a car wrecked in an accident and an old sweater) implies a rejection of the notion that contemporary man is simply a machine for consumption, parasitic and destructive. Despite everything, man cannot and will not free himself of memory; the capacity to remember is his history, is what has transformed an ancient animal into a thinking, reflective, constructive being. It is to memory that man owes the prerogative of having become an actor in his own life; it was the need for memory that built the dolmens and the menhirs, the first tangible sign of man’s constructive capacity, and the utopia of perennial memory, of eternity, gave rise to the pyramids.
Today, science equips us virtually with a sort of omnipotence; memory resides not in the grandiose but in the detail. We do not want merely to leave a memory of ourselves but to have now a memory of what we are.
Behind each painting Lorenzo synthesises his history. A line in a diary, for the rusts in particular, documents the site of their origin and the date of execution. Speaking of them he says: “The composition achieved is a dimension in which I lose and find myself, reflecting on the relativity of time, the savour of the vacuum, the magnificence and diversity of life, the porosity of a grain of sand. Each of these aspects generates an awareness of who I am and swathes my personality in the way that rust swathes iron.”
His applying and disapplying, as he himself defines a certain phase of his production also marked by the Individui (Individuals) cycle, is an integral part of this meditation, of this probing of what makes us up, shapes us and represents us. The rust is a tangible sign of Time, of its action that transforms matter normally conceived as wear, corruption, decay, consumption. Filomeni’s creative action overturns this negative significance to render it the vehicle of new metaphors, morphing it into the active part of a representation in which it appears beautiful. Its aesthetic significance  enables its redemption, so that it becomes a narrative element, and the immediate significance of this happening is to posit the possibility of rehabilitation for everything. In the wake of Foscolo, we can therefore say that man’s desire to act upon beauty cannot fail to continually reshape his path even when it seems lost. This is the potential of art and its constantly renewed promise.

Antonella Serafini
Viareggio, dicembre 2008

 

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