| Lino Cataldi’s settings continue to allude to animate and inanimate nature. Far from
suggesting still life, though, these settings are in dynamic development that suggest
unstable conflations of landscapes, seascapes and skyscapes.
The principal subject is a probably angry energy, not only physical but psychic, that bursts
outwards from a particular symbolic location within each composition. Coming into focus
amidst water vapours, shadows and flames, the energy reveals itself in embryonic forms,
as in the daring echo of Michelangelo’s creation of Adam. But elsewhere, as in “The
Angel”, a vortex seems less to produce life than to absorb living forms into itself. Often the
paintings thus exemplify a tense balance between impressions of creation and of decay.
The disturbing beauty of these compositions is apparent in the two styles of coloration, the
strong contrasts in the more angry paintings and the wonderful control of chromaticism in
the only apparently calmer works. |
