Roberta Bertozzi interno 38

Notes on the paintings of Davide Baroggi
catalog of the personal exhibition of Davide Baroggi
Galleria Fiorella Pieri Arte Contemporanea, Cesena 2010

abstract

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Baroggi’s quest is to be identified within the ductus, the track. It is inside the frank and unmediated track of his art, inside the decisively elementary syntax with which he approaches human figures or landscapes, as well as inside his attempt to deform the ideogram and the achieved, imposed or conventional character of the image, I believe, one can see that the power of a regained objectivity is primarily at work, at the same time as sensations become total experiences and new forms of understanding. Primary colours and original chromatic matching are disposed according to a strident and secretly uncanny mode; his nervous, wrinkled brush strokes appear as they have been deprived of all kind of finishing; colours seem to cling to the fortuitous and rudimentary matter of their support; a bright, yet almost roughly drafted, stylization, comes along with a drastic two-dimensional form; the outlines are put into relief, thus violently separating, like a stigma on the body of representation, the plan of evidence from the threat of a possible vaporization towards which the backdrop could converge. All these elements designate a resolute rejection of illusionism, as well as a rigorous painting discipline: they address the need to draw a figurative legitimacy, a life, from the realm of appearances.
If, as many readings of his art suggest, it all originated in Expressionism, I reckon such artistic affiliation has occurred purely in the name, and in the quality, of a realism that has been brought to its ultimate stages, one that is everything but delirious. Yet, as always, one has to ascertain which are the boundaries between an sharpening reproduction of reality and, on the other hand, its ordinary, hallucinated and hallucinatory aggravation, one which we are constantly – and often unconsciously – exposed to.