top of page

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”).

bottom of page