Curated by Matteo Bergamini.

The third solo show of Aldo Runfola (Palermo 1950, lives and works in Berlin) opens on June 9 at the Michela Rizzo Gallery, after the solo show "Eventi" in 2014 and "Welcome-Goodbye" in 2004.

Aldo Runfola is one of the most enigmatic Italian artists, voted to a "personalistic" disappearance for a reappropriation of a deep and critical thought around the work of art.

His production is poetic to the extent of aesthetics: the approach to the construction of meaning is not so much located in the visual as in the political gesture that permeates every conscious action. Runfola's work is not acted on by impulse, nor can it be interpreted under the fashion or contemporary "shamanism" aspects, but by investigating these phenomena from another perspective it assumes a cutting and marginal force, deconstructing "on the sides". Nothing is generalized or "visible" in the artist's production, but it is necessary to approach the works with a gaze willing to think of a dissolved form, which is given as enigmatic.

In the three series on show at the Michela Rizzo gallery, Macchie or Gocce, Nomi and Ritratti, the works lose the "problem" of authorship starting not so much from the common mechanical production of the work, which still disturbs the popular perception of art, as in a sequence of punctum - logos, lists of names, spots identical to each other, in fact - elements of the preconstituted order that circumscribe a strip of identity and at the same time elude it.

They are symbols repeatedly identical to themselves, valid in every field of existence, called to affirm a belonging in the world, both as individuals and in the community. Elements that are interpreted by a personal imaginative and cultural power; they are “signifiers” which in relation to objects convey what De Saussure defines as the “concept”, that is the meaning that creates language by arbitrarily linking words and things.

From this point of view Aldo Runfola has been investigating a conceptual dimension of art for years which, starting from universally recognized forms, exerts a pressure on the vision, leaving the simple recognizability to free the work from the status of the "dictatorship of beauty" and of an appeal. “Social”, to load it with a series of metaphorical trompe l'œil that grant the work a threshold of critical openness, of a questioning contiguous to the experience of vision.

Bertrand Rougé, quoted by Elio Grazioli in his volume dedicated to contemporary art to the limits of "Infrasottile", writes: "The work of art is distinguished from the simple object by the fact that it is what calls us to look at you at least twice". But Grazioli urges: "Looking at a work of art, even the first time is a concern. It is already looked at with an interrogative attention, an awareness that it is not an object like the others. Already the first glance, in art, is the second ".

It is also from this assumption that it would be too easy to look at spots, portraits or lists as if they were simply such, but Runfola overturns the situation and adds a third step to the double glance that reserves for the work: a denial that brings us back to the original. significant: they are spots, it is true, but even if placed there at random, almost with aesthetic indifference, they "speak".

The theme on the plate could be only one: the universal one of identity, expressed in this case through art criticism. Criticism exercised in its ancient etymology of choice, which obviously also passes through a stance against that aesthetic and civil anesthetization that the communication society requires.

A criticism that cannot fail to approach the word "crisis", which to quote Ivan Illich, an intellectual to whom Aldo Runfola often refers Runfola chooses the shadow as a state from which to let a never direct message arrive, and for this reason even more corrosive .

It happens in the Portraits of Arthur Rimbaud, Friedrich Nietzsche, Deleuze or Rudolf Stingel: the recognition is minimal, the exactness of the strokes becomes a compound of pictograms that are on par with the homogeneity of the drops, recreating the shadows of those men of 'today whose constant is that of “a glaring lack of theoretical activity and its negation”, writes Runfola himself. Instead, he chooses, in fact, great thinkers and wonders if there still exist "Speculative men skilled in pervading the data within everyone's reach with a light of truth usually unavailable except to the few who are able to intuit it. A supremely logical skill, not at all romantic, much less irrational ". And this is how the ARs are accomplished and arranged neatly and pictorially to sanction a non-literary union but made of empathies with words, art, philosophy, between the practice of Runfola and these men approached by common frequencies, sympathies, friendship. , esteem or through encounters in the paths of the mind. Fleeing the idea of ​​"visionarity" as much as conformist anti-dogmatism.

Nell’epoca della comunicazione il corpus di opere di Aldo Runfola appare a sua volta profondamente reazionario: è quel che di più lontano possa esistere dalla pura immagine, dall’arte per l’arte, da ritorni a favore di esercizi professionali o messi a punto per compiacere il pubblico.

Bauman's old liquid society has currently been superseded by a gaseous civilization where the transmission of data that allows us to navigate between pre-existing or configurable resources is in the cloud - in the global cloud - and together with the impregnability of air seems to be the possibility of building a right to existence on the basis of one's own needs and needs other than those categorized is increasingly distant. In short, nothing happens by chance and here too Aldo Runfola opens a gap in thought.

The Drops or Stains, writes the artist, "arbitrarily reproduce the case in which the points are arranged on the canvas". They are a “free” event, that is, not linked to aesthetic logic, which has the surface of the canvas as its development area. They are another striking example of how the randomness of identity is subject to a non-pre-established disposition, which tends in every way to widen and overflow from the borders: in the spots it is metaphorically clear how the presence of man tries to dominate not only if itself, but also the atrophied space of the present in which it is dammed. It is beyond any doubt a dystopian image: “[…] I am talking about those who one day, summing up, come to the conclusion that they have discovered“ social nothingness ”. No withdrawal from the world, therefore: indeed, more dense participation: the more dense the more in bad faith, necessitated by the lack of alternatives, and intended as a parody. No asceticism; drops and portraits are formed: by affinity with chance, by the ability to come out of the enclosure of the canvas that contains the stains, by strategy or grandeur. Like the Arnolfini chandelier, what will remain of these lists on a temporally fragile bill like the memory of history can be?

"Art is above all a board game to which one must adapt in order not to be cornered and forgotten" writes Runfola, speaking of another project. This is perhaps the nodal point of this negative Big Brother to which, with the "second vision" reserved for this body of works, we can access by coming into contact with the revolutionary part, the one that instead of considering the truth as "euphemistically pure and simple right to exist ”allows us to discover below the surface the cracks which - in certain circumstances of awareness and thought - could be able to generate that social earthquake that some men have been carrying. Today and yesterday.