Antonello Viola

Each work consists of several glass panels arranged side by side or overlapping in order to achieve a horizontal format – the typical format of landscape painting – which in some cases expands into a panorama. Viola’s characteristic abstract style of painting unfolds on each glass panel, where oil paint, crayon and gold leaf alternate, juxtaposing tangible with more rarefied areas, opaque with reflective, and transparent surfaces. The result is far removed from the physical description – be it geographical or scenic – of the island that gives each work its title. The actual landscape dissolves into a vibrant atmosphere that settles on the various glass panels, resulting in uneven, dense or disjointed colour fields interspersed with golden, blue and turquoise highlights that together trace a horizon with irregular contours. Horizons, but also aerial views, as the vertical scansion of the works suggests, where the place of exchange between land and water, the constant negotiation of the edge of the island, the wave, the undertow is rendered in transparency.

The work with its distinctive architecture, which is emphasised by the transparency of the glass, simulates the mechanism of memory by reproducing a real experience or a fantastic evocation. Like a recollection, which often appears in the mind not as a clear vision but as a vague, fragmentary image, an impalpable impression, so the islands painted by Viola capture on glass the chromatic substance, the reflection of that essential union of sky, water, light, vapour, sand, rock, which is made manifest in the island – or in the idea of that island.

Just as in memory, the elements of the landscape in Viola’s works do not appear in an orderly sequence, but overlap and interpenetrate each other and seem over the course of time to have settled themselves in their residual chromatic essence on the glass panels.

Time as the measure of painting.

The image of the places is broken down into its familiar colours and shapes and reassembled in combinations in which the space and time of the earthly elements can be recognised, but only out of the corner of the eye, by abandoning oneself to the perception of the senses.

Each element is not crystallised in a closed form, but rather, as a sign placed in relation to the others, evokes the incessant transformation of matter that changes its state, of rock that becomes sand, of the constant movement of the sea, of water evaporated by the sun, foamed by the waves and the wind. Islands are par excellence territories whose boundaries shift, which are constantly redefined by the tides, vibrating with the reflections of light on the water that surrounds them.

The idea of the ‘open boundary’, be it the edge of the sheet, of the grid of squares traced by the artist within it, of the two-dimensional surface (as well as the island), is a key issue in Antonello Viola’s entire oeuvre, not just in his production on glass.

Viola’s works on paper are the result of a long process of alternating layers of paint with scratching, glazing, grooving, erasing and further layers. They offer the eye a rich and precious surface which conceals the meticulous work of superimposing and removing paint and material from which they were created, while at the same time allowing a glimpse of it. The gesture that initiates this slow process of accumulation and thinning is a grid of squares traced by the artist in pencil that delimits the field of play of the painting. However, it is a permeable boundary, a line that is constantly crossed, blurred and overstepped by the paint, which leads to tension within the work.

The works on glass, which began in 2012 and have since been continued in parallel with the works on paper, allow the artist to experiment with a similar mixed technique, which is used here on a less flexible and more fragile support. Thanks to its transparency, the glass itself becomes an actor in the layering process. Not only do the glass panels allow painting on both sides, front and back, they are also physically superimposed, creating a great depth and articulated layering that on paper is achieved solely by the addition or removal of paint.

Production on glass thus complements production on paper, and glass becomes the artist’s material of choice due to its special characteristics, as it allows maximum transparency and luminosity, and the qualities of the individual colours as well as the clash of gold, turquoise and blue and the transitions from one colour to another are emphasised.

The squares are also drawn on the glass panels: here they merge with the edges of the individual sheets, making the perception of the work even more complex and blending the real plane with that of the representation.

The use of glass is evokes Alberti’s idea of the window as a metaphor for painting, but also as a photographic plate that records a portion of reality. Here the glass seems to capture the very glow of the landscape, and Viola’s painting of open borders offers the eye that incessant exchange between water and land, where borders do not exist but are constantly being redrawn by the passage of time as well as by the tides and the movement of the waves. The glass plates become the photographic slides of a spiritual journey, capturing the essence of a place that is both an island as well as all islands.

Sara de Chiara