| The idea that Fidel Lino Cataldi’s paintings are fragmentary is only an illusion. If we put our
magnifying glass close to his works, consider every detail and the nuances of each detail, we
realize we haven't stripped the Artist's soul of its secrets. We have simply set off on a smooth
road that we are already familiar with. We need our magnifying glass close to the painting to
understand what we ourselves are really made of: Precisely - because the paintings we are
looking at, are ourselves, everyone, captured by the sharp eye of the painter and transformed
into images. So we need a lens to help us discover everyday reality, our smooth road that we
can go down with greater and greater ease. The works I am writing about not only involve us
as human beings, because they are, without exception, immersed in suffering in its most
agonizing manifestation: extraneousness, but we are above all involved as the inhabitants of
a new Babel which, in Cataldi's strokes, summarizes and exalts its own disintegration.
Continuity of subject, fragmentary language, unity of intention. These are the pillars of all his
artistic and social development. I am not just the art critic, I am the observer, the one who
seeks the fragrance of life, not ephemeral and fleeting, but difficult to trace, and harsh to the
senses. What I would like you to see in the painting is what attracts us through the use of
color, through and by means of the plasticity of the figures. At times we are intoxicated -
whatever techniques are used - with detached indifference, since the canvases - we like to
refer to them as such - represent the subject and summarize, without ever emphasizing, the
qualities of this subject not only in our everyday life, but also in the touching participation of
the Painter in contemporary subjects. Exotic flowers, as explosive as matter being formed or
shattered by atomic action, almost make us tremble. Astonished butterflies, deprived of a
limpid sky where they can fly freely. Hiding places, vortices, beings halfway between man and
animal, represent the garden of his decomposition. The road is still smooth and we continue
to follow it. Our glass shakes in our hand. Perhaps we hurry off ... looking for ourselves in the
color that characterizes us. Fragmentary? ... or rather a clear and painful vision - the
impossibility of acting? I like to slip along that road without straying, keeping in contact with
things, returning along it and rediscovering in myself, as in a kaleidoscope, appropriated and
elevated as symbols of a tragedy which can be resolved only in the Community. A singular
minstrel without music presenting us with his soundless ancient song. If we set aside our
glass we see him, Cataldi, as he really is, and not as many would like to see him, different
from himself and, as a result, from all of us. |
