​

​

The Filoplastica is first and foremost a particular pictorial form that reflects a vision of a reality born from contemplation of the hardships in life, beginning from the primary manifestations in the biological sphere.

Its antecedents can be found in the artistic debates of the sixties in a context when the coordinates for creating art were focussed, on one hand, on the assertion of the artist to incorporate every impact with reality within his subjectivity, and on the other, on the conviction that art was able to redeem the world, rejecting it in favour of a peremptory understanding of the ultimate essence of reality. In both cases, this related to two ways of interpreting art that converged in the common evasion of actual reality.

When I created his first pictorial form, Tonaltimbrica in 1967, these two approaches were rejected in favour of a concept that, refusing traditional metaphysics, had to acknowledge the objectivity of reality, and first of all, the burden of violence and subjugation that inevitably occurs in nature. According to my artistic concept, nature could not represent a reassuring territory to be explored in order to perceive, beyond the multi-coloured scenario of the sensitive world, the arcane mysteries of a divine code that would have ensured safe redemption from evil. And this same complexity, the multiple forms of existence, could not be justified from the perspective of an original creative vitality that considers evil as a component that, to a certain extent, is necessary for the harmony of the cosmos. From the Tonaltimbrica perspective, multiplicity was to be considered as the declination of a situation, a system that was most apparent in biological antagonism.

Therefore, painting became a form of testimony, an accusation that was expressed by a sharp and penetrating “signic” form, able to reiterate the spasmodic contrast and violent permeation characteristic of nature.

In 1971, the barbed and aggressive Tonaltimbrica code evolved to become Filoplastica. It assumed the fluidity of a sinuous gossamer-fine filament that existed in symbiosis with the colour tone of the painting.

The graphics that created the boundaries and intensified the Tonaltimbrica composition, abandoned the most characteristic aspects, most closely linked with tradition. Marks and pictorial signs were no longer used to create boundaries but were overlaid as an extension of the colour. The most common element in painting in its various forms then disappeared: that overlaying of the ‘grapheme’, understood precisely as the fundamental mark that structures a painting with its confines.

It was a kind of ‘regression’, an immersion into a primeval substance, liberated from every negative interpretation, and precisely for this reason, any reference to a possible or potential world. It assumed the characteristics of a luminescent extension, crystalline and practically weightless. In fact, Filoplastica is nothing other than the return of the Tonaltimbrico world to theoretical roots of matter. It does not present itself as overcoming the sensitive world in a spiritualistic sense. However, precisely because the same foundations of reflection on reality refused categorical hypotheses on its actual structure, a possibility was developed to reflect on a Filoplastico ideal type, parallel with the tragedy of existence, from which to draw schemas and projects resulting from a new material form able to reorganize itself according to different possibilities.

​

Buggiano, 11 May 2015

​

Marco Almaviva

​

©2023 by Archivio Almaviva