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The Filoplastica and Its Developments
A Path towards His Own Reality
Carmelo Strano
In Milan, however, Almaviva was stimulated conceptually; not in regards to work in itself but to his reflection on art, with an awareness that instigating even powerful deviations is possible, such as in Spatialism, to be precise. Although he had some insight and intuition in this regard, he did not dive in right away and develop works of this sort. It was not until 2018, with his Archetypes, that Almaviva would be able to claim victory: over himself and others. [...] It is astonishing just how many were infected, in various ways, directly or indirectly by Fontana’s work! Self love took him further, that is, where it had been impossible, he immediately arrived because countless types of extra-object art had established themselves. In Almaviva, however, the obsession for surpassing the canvas medium remained, that which does not break free from the Fontanian shackles or even the existential exasperations of Piero Manzoni. Finally, in recent times, in 2018, the canvas no longer existed. It seems that by now the distant, yet still current, lesson of Luigi Pareyson on the distinction between the forming of form and form formed had a profound effect on him. His "Archetypes", although always ideally children of Filoplastica, are paintings that have eluded the canvas while creating a painting. The painting is self-woven and self-supporting. The pattern appears random, and the representation (or the subject) is not something the artist desired at all. During the spontaneous and haphazard development of the tangled mass, the work unfolds in a formative performative manner. Moreover, the monsters disappear. If then the old question still had any meaning between figure and abstraction, it definitively lost all foundation. Even if its aim were not purely aesthetic, but only as an idea of it, Manzoni would have made it his own straight away . . . But new generations will be able to benefit from it now, if only they manage to not fall into the trap that the alternative to traditional painting is all in extra-objectivity. The painting is selfmade. Ipse dixit (Latin for “he himself said it”).
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