It happened to me, observing the works of Federico Lanaro, all of his works without exception, to think of one of the most interesting and, in my view, revolutionary works in the history of art: Night view of Toledo by El Greco.
Within this painting dated 1601, we find the unknown of the search for the right verse, the right and the left, the top and the bottom, the front and the back and even the problematic of the presence of the observer, as well as the limit of the picture that here does not seem to exist and the notion of the sign as an inaugural gesture of change.
It is not at all risky to think that Federico started from there and from that work that anticipated that complex cultural moment, which in reality has no certain dates and preordained scansions, which takes the name of Romanticism, to grow a process that is the sum of all his artistic path and that sees the natural element - often the tree - and the human presence outside the picture - the observer - and that gives the name to the exhibition Signs.
The signs of Federico do not have an artist's ambition (although it seems difficult not to think of it) but they are simple fixed points of the experience, his or anyone's who can recognize themselves in it, that helps trace back the existence and resuscitate the memory.
His trees, the sticker of the dog that watches, the piano left on the sidewalk, as well as the nature reinterpreted with the "transfers", remind us a bit of a field of ruins to whose apparent disorder Federico wants to replace with order, and to which he feels the need to give history, oblivious to the fact that under his eyes, as Augè wrote, he has the construction site of time in the space where to
build the inventory of lost myths and objects1: the observers and observed are confused with one other, as interpretative theories and sequences historical, finds and mythical episodes.
In fact, any ruin is a mythopoeic machine capable of narrations that makes use of ghosts and beings lost in a fractured and consumed time, while the distant and prodigious whisper to magical thought or to the urban legend, although there is no fixed place, because the listeners-readers of these lost stories are indeterminate.
The same time that we find in the path of Federico we also find while we observe the work of the Greek artist where the movement of the trees and the leaden color of the sky are clearly the signs of an imminent change. The signal / sign that we observe and that presents itself before us and which, in the works of the artist from Trentino, do appear by establishing their own destination - their own destiny - as the destination to be reached or as a bank on which to bounce.
El Greco has changed the meaning of human relationships, altered the rational order of the world, reversed the roles and put the viewer's ideas upside down overturning the universe.
Federico Lanaro was able, with his paintings, to represent nature as an acceptance of the mirror of interiority, a place of the experience of the individual, an anxiety to the reunification of the Whole2.
He has been brave in wanting to exalt his desire to find a path with the simplicity of a tree, because the tree is, and always shall be, a sign that shows us where we are, and even if put upside down, that tree will always make us find our way back.
The courage to reverse the march, to clash with the unstable equilibrium or to overturn the image, here are the signs.
Are not thee indeed the signs of change?
Simona Gavioli
1 M. Augè, Ruins and Debris, Boringhieri, Turin, 2004
2 E. Burke, Investigation on Beauty and the Sublime, Aesthetica, Palermo, 2002. "Anything that can arouse ideas of pain and danger, that is all that is, in a certain sense, terrible, or that concerns terrible objects, or that acts in a way similar to terror, it is a source of the Sublime, that is, what produces the strongest emotion that the soul is capable of feeling. "
3 F. Lathrop, “Right” and “Left” in Pictures, The Burlington magazine for Connoisseur IX, 39, 1906, Pp. 198
