Ten years after a reflection on the pictorial work of Gian Paolo Dulbecco, with which I still agree, encountering testimonies ofthe most recent research by the artist, hosted since last autumn at thè Alchimie Verbali exhibition space, the communication workshop that I run inSalerno, I feel the need to come to grips with the developments ohis expressive investigation andwìth a personal interpretation that inevitably seeks distinction from thè notations that another had made in a time far away and, in many ways, lost.

Dulbecco's oneiric autobiography leaves out ofconsideration the enchanted wood and enclosesthe scene in an invisible casket of crystal, through which we have the impression that the forms of the landscape and the mysterious presences of humans are animated in a cyctical path,as happens for the androids of cultured Mitteleuropean clockmaking in the anxious age of the Enlightenment. Nature, in contrast, presents itself as phantasmatic and iconic, at the same time, having to take on the role of the theatre stage, the minute, totemic trees that mark the emptied spatiality of the dream appear as ancient and ancestral values for a mystery semantics.

Suspended time, in which the narration is gleaned as through a magic lantern, allows meditation on the appearance of references and on the laborious and fertile citation that, on the verge of recognition, makes itself the craftsman of an arcane and cultured language, handed down by an unnamed brotherhood in which the collectors of testimonies are recognised: Savinio first and foremost, but also De Chirico and, then, Magritte, are scenographer to whom is addressed the scenic "machina" of Dulbecco's thoughtful and settied direction, a direction that, not far removed from psychological reclamations close to the painting with a Symbolist mood, retrieves existential feeling in the atmospheres of the unreal Flemish everyday. Where, infact, the operators ofMetaphysics have recommended the necessity and urgency of the paradigm, absolute and apocalyptic for the clear disappearance of tension towards the present and confrontation with reality, the works transcribed from the spirit of Van Eyck and Vermeer are immediately brought onto the plane of a feeling, which does not renouncethe reasons for existence of the spaces of the everyday, of time dissolved in the rarefied interiors where light resides as the essence of a spirituality that is anything but physical.

Thus Dulbecco, between Narcissus, in the mirror ofthe soul, and Prometheus, the builder of a new world, weaves a laborious cloth in the manner of Penelope, a cloth spun from utopia, where a weft of skill is imposed in the form of the mythical story, asking colour to make itself the memory of ancient recollection, of which every retablo has been lost, except that of the sentiment of collective fables, of which the spirit feels a powerful sense of recognition.

A reversal in time seems to conduci us to the sources of knowledge that, while it wears the fascinating dress of the Tuscan tradition, poses rigid oppositions between worlds marked by different cultural ideologica! identities; identity strongly rooted in an ideology that awaits the realisation of the utopias predicted and unfolded by the artist as the canonical key of hope. It is a hermeneutic procedure both ancient and fragile, which draws its thematic core from vestiges lost in time that, not without effort, are gradually unearthed from memory.

In metahistorical painting, brought onto the stage at the same time is false political consciousness with its banner, always with a hope of changing the world, a strategy of communication between patent deceptiveness and lucid awareness of the contradictory nature of time.

At this point, the artist makes himself the socio-political pioneer, opens up the workshop of vision and shapes his product as container and content of the metaphorical story, topos of the journey of initiation and anticipation of a remodelled season of priniary values. In this way, the environment becomes only a potential story, where the whole landscape becomes the immense ark of a cathedral, the paradigm of a spatial and signic spirituality, inasmuch as required by typified idealities, the latter suspended between testimony and ambiguous disguise. Nature on Dulbecco's stage appears contradictory and complex. and the landscape a paradigmatic antecedent in eternal competition with time. Everything is infomed, therefore, with a polycentric ethics, mode of an ultraorthodox language.

Every fragment is focused on an event with enormous emotive scope, continually verifying the basic project, manifesting an extreme desire to contribute to pursuing utopia, which appears as the presupposed and final event of the vision, something unstated, precisely because that metaphysical neorealism of the conscience of the author could be hard to theorise. A world pacified and purifìed of the contingent, it stretches over the surface of things and over the landscape that, as a whole, personifies ideas, prepares a logical-geomerric discourse, as the figurative strength of mythology, balancing opposing forces.

The resulting scene seems the logical development of the mythology of the golden age, a spiritual wave that seems to draw from nothing a kingdom of possibilities, made of references to mentally linguistic symbologies of a persuasive story crossed by unconscious sonorities. A veiled chronotope of consciousness, where actions prior to vision are felt, between contradictory disturbances and deceptive appearances. Dulbecco's is an affabulatory fantasy, called upon to unmask claustrophobic space, which in the end brings to being a transparent comparison, to become the possessor of the anxiety dissolved in the air; it is, furthermore, a dynamic effective narrative that mobilises space not without doubts as to the semantically and structurally strong role of the landscape. For this reason too the single perspectived character of the psychological story is imposed, in the staged finale structured with thematic dislocations that place the essence of the distance in the time of the action.

A "primitive" stage, then, broadly referenced in the historical sphere: a temporal discard, in the final analysis, of thematic investigation, represented in the specific language of images. Nevertheless, the scientific nature of the author's cognitive structure does not deprive the narration of the tension towards desire, first of all, concerning the truthfulness of complexity re-constructed in the mind starting from the spirit, concerning the self-referential nature of representation, introspection through colour, irony and the game of identification, self-representation, fìnally, between being and appearing in a continuity that is, as has been stated, dynamic.

Dulbecco speaks of the active imagination of the fable through marvellous representability, the grandiloquent spectacle, the primary mise en scène thick with a non passive tranquillity between denied utopias and refluxes of hope: all this also through phantasmagorical developments of perspective, between formal and "semantic" architraves. He speaks of the deliberate restructuring of the universe that passes through architectural theatrical heroism, yet embellished as though through a mask. And he speaks, finally, of a path of maturation of the stage of memory, of the recovery of the formal noble tradition, of the implicit tragedy of existence. All this with recurrences of landscape as lines of discourse, with fiction as the structure of the elegiac vision in the spellbound adolescent gaze, with insistent amazement at the mystery an an equally spellbound view of artifice.

The landscape is thus transfigured between ancestral anxieties in atmospheres framing a tabulated Orphism, made of spellbound visions. A logic of the incomprehensible is unfolded before iconograms with liberatory totality of the figurative memory. The author appears, behind the scenes, as a megalithic self-reflexive narrator, the invisible spectator of the scene of memory with the telescope of unreality. He performs the ritual of the imagination in imaginative gestuality, stylised with nocturnal shadow in abstract luminosity and with this he embarks upon self-verifìcation as an artistic intellectual experience. The tree, isolated in an atmospheric space, unfolds an archaic religious sense of universal architectures, capable of the destructive force of the illusion in the imaginative invention of the metaphor, the same that makes the mountain the centre of the world, a place of the sky linked to the earth, which draws together the profound distances of the horizons.

Dulbecco walks in the garden of the soul, in a nature that is not indifferent, between shadows carried and interplays of shadows and light in the sileni nights of sublime magic. He traces the whole subtext of the unnsaid on the eternal symbology of the myth, on the earth in the golden age, on the lunar dawn from the stage of the absurd, evoking the sin of hubris of the alchemist. Squaring the reason-power ratio with the circle, the "place" of the fluid and eternally mutable space of the esoteric-natural dimension, the author gives life to a deadly spell that makes existence an illness. In his metahistorical horizonhe speaks of the irrecoverable loss of the original picture, of the upsetting of and compensation for the real, o fa new space of authenticity and moral rigour; he speaks of an aesthetics that rescues pain, of the beauty of the ideal in the human landscape, to the point of the consoling obsession of art, made of symbolic spatial arrangements, of the formal wisdom of the albeit aware representation of the impenetrable and of the indifference of a figurative splendour. The solar noctutne makes the similarities in human paths emerge, enables the author to reflect on the relationship between art, nature and history and on the possibility that mixing gives rise to an idea of possible beauty.

Dulbecco echoes his narrating voice, identifies a benign unifying nature, indicates an ideal of life, the whole thing gathering the shreds of a past triumph between the songs of a cryptic imagination. His joumey of initiation in art is the fable of the prefiguration of utopia: it contemplates atemporal reality and constructs a beauty to be recognised there. As a knowing alchemist, he refers everything back to an indecipherable aspect of the vision of the world, he profoundly understands the landscape and the awareness of the path, he conquers a religious awareness ofthe intellect and reason, measures the space of imperceptible feelings, redeems history as a simple and indubitable truth, recovering the whole past in the essence of life.

He reaffirms lost values through the spirit of the story, renounces the real in representing emotions, recovers the thought of Michelangelo on the invented as the only possible reality, refers the present to a time that is who knows how far away. It seems almost as though Dulbecco, as had happened to Luchino Visconti, resorts to the most complete artifice to reach reality.

Enigmatic and mysterious scenographies in instantaneous and tonal luminosities refer back to the stereotype of ancient stagecraft, only apparently immutable, evoking the neverassuaged ambiguity of history between solitude and melancholy; hence the rarefaction of the human presence, which, in all cases, also appears abstract and metaphysical. The indefinite and unnerving beauty of the locations is questioned, as a spectator on stilts, on the archaic rite of a free community between the deceptive aspect of nature, the myth of youth in the apparent perfection and dilationof time of utopia. The artist, meanwhile, appears on his way towards an ascetic post-romantic life, which nevertheless cannot leave anthropological and ideological polarities out of consideration, without will outside itself and art, between the divine and the human.

Claudio Caserta
Art historian and critic of the University of Salerno
May, 2002