HAVE WRITTEN ABOUT THE ARTIST

The refined pictorial discourse of Aloni defined itself through constant research. The artist did not come to this considerable and expressive result by chance but by absorbing different experiences. Openly abstract language and then a more figurative inspiration marked his past expressive experimentation. Both aspects though, have never been entirely forgotten, and in their own time and ways have provided his search with fresh vigour.

In fact, looking at his latest works, one can see the presence of a figuration and of a morphological syntax which find their shape in subtle abstract values. Abstraction and figuration intensively coexist within Aloni’s paintings.

Aloni intends to highlight the richness of his visual language construction, achievement of an ideal perfection model beyond any landscape impressionism. And it is from this point of view that the rigorous articulation of his lines acquires importance and creates not only sobriety but also vivid shaping of forms of houses, trees, buildings and boats. The clear determination of the linear aspects prevails over the mere values of the colour effects. To Aloni it is important to impress on the image a character of exemplary clarity although within an unspoken and almost imperceptible inscrutability. An expression of mystery, which at times becomes even disturbing, and that becomes evident especially in those works where people, which present a certain sentimental feature, are portrait. By following this path of reflection, the critic Franco Passoni has expressed a correct and vivid interpretation of Aloni’s art: ‘…nature is silent and solicits considered attention. With his imagination Aloni has captured all of these problems, and as an artist he has developed images that reflect this collection…’ they are absent icon-like faces, lost in their incomprehensible thoughts.

There is no dialogue between them and each of them is a separate world, not communicable to the others. A broad portrait typology which seems to present a modern interpretation of the statuary imperturbable psychology of the Sacra Conversazione (Sacred Conversation) or of the Flagellazione (Flagellation) painted by Piero della Francesca the great artist of Humanism who is deeply loved by Aloni, as was clearly visible in his one-man exhibition which took place at Palazzo del Pretorio in Borgo San Sepolcro, native town of the extraordinary Renaissance artist.

A suggestive enchantment springs from Aloni’s elegant simplification of the shapes. This allows a strong tactile isolation of the figures, a better reading of the painting and visual recognition. The artist highlights the pure value of the planes, on which the limpid transparency of a coherent chromatism transpires. The okras, yellows, deep reds, indigos are the colours that highlight the discrete presence of a tempered light. Aloni construes his compositions with calibrated patience, puts their architectonical intonation in result especially when it comes to characteristic ‘prospective fugues’ of houses which divide the work into two parts ( as it can be seen in the constructive volumetric extension of his Grande Paese, 1995). The colourful vibrations are intentionally not present so that the articulation of the surfaces is made evident together with their clear inlay of geometrical revelations. And Aloni’s most concentrated and meditative works assume the tone of a poetical revelation.

The valorisation of the structures and the coherent link of the various composition elements appear evident in his cultivated plastic expression. The artist has managed to attentively observe the great past of Italian paintings and reinterpret it within modern art canons, with specific attention to those ones that present a stylising transfiguration of reality. Aloni’s creativity finds possible elements of comparison in Magic Realism, but also in the limpid and geometric naturalism of Casorati. His style evolves along a sensitive manifestation of style which confers to his paintings a sense of potent visual evocation. And everything happens without deformation, eliminating any possible disturbance of the expressive order. A rhythm, which is measured, together with a spatial link of whatever unnatural energy spring within the painting, and become tangible with silence discretion. It is then that one can clearly come to understand the value of the sign: pure, without any violent imprinting of the stroke. A precious line that of Aloni, which never becomes calligraphic practice. By taking inspiration from the great art masters, without avoiding a confrontation with contemporary figuration, Aloni feeds his personal internal story with circumspection and acumen.

A soul and colour narrative which becomes an experience of the memory: an inviting and mysterious symposium of art and humanities.

Enzo Aloni is a painter of real atmosphere.
During his career he has often brought to his works the kind of subtle suggestions that only an attentive spirit is able to capture, and then translate, on the canvas. Starting from observing the world aroud us, the artist has filtered the mystery underlying all realities and created separated worlds. In his previous works these worlds are abstractions of things and places inhabited by people sealed by a bond of membership that guarantees their identity. The language of realism allows the mind to overcome the instinctive impulse of pattern recognition and then, to hover in the upper echelons of the sensations and feel the magic that emanates from the silent conversation of the inhabitants of these paintings. Realism disregards the form and turns to abstraction the extent to which it becomes to be the means used by Aloni to suggest us that the mystery conceals itself behind the images we are more familiar with.

What fascinates the artist is the elusive enigma behind the everyday life dividing the reality in what we see through with our eyes and what we catch with our intellect.

Aloni undertakes an analysis of the invisible reality gradually making the places and their people independent and free to acquire their specific meaning and to emancipate theirselves from their usual context. Thus he begins to investigate groups of people or things that are alike and the relationships that may arise among them: those works were exhibited in 2009 in Milan in the solo show Similari e loro Mondi. The inhabitants of Alonis’ works are totally disconnected from their obvious place in the world: there are no horizons, roads or backgrounds that reveal the real setting, but that not even exclude it. It is as if the artist had picked an image, friezed it, cleaned from all the disturbing elements, and finally had given its soul back: a process that could be define as cognitive in which the public has the chance, in fact, of knowing what usually is neglected: the deepest essence of things. The cleaning phase involves not only the elimination of the reduntant, but also the stylization of the main elements: as stylization we mean the metamorphosis that the artist makes of shapes and colors to reach an homogeneity that trascends individual caractheristics of each subject trought an accurate research of soft tonal variations and the repetition of carefully stylized shapes. So Aloni gives life to parallel Worlds, linked to us by the thin thread of images taken from our reality. The inhabitants of these Worlds are the so called Similari, that are repeated, apparentely identical, but different indeed, and live surrounded by the ambiguity to be real or unreal: an enigma that goes beyond the canvas to creep into the mind of the observer.

It has been noted that after the second half of the 19th century, many European artists began to progressively reject that form of pictorial and plastic representation that contained an excessive preponderance of naturalistic references, which were in opposition to the sensorial experience of the singular characters who inhabited the art world. This tendency, along with the continuing proliferation of the various “artistic trends” that quickly came one after the other, served to symbolise the power of the images, conceived by the artists, that followed in continuity and which came together in the “non-figurative” style.

It was thus that in many of the more or less abstract movements the artists followed the indications that bordered on the “avant-garde” of our century, which itself has significantly marked the modernity of our culture. The painter Enzo Aloni, who was born in Stradella in 1940 but has lived and worked for many years in Milan, could not help but feel at least a part of these influences which, even when they were inspired by reality, led to the stylisation of shapes, balanced by a somewhat bright chromaticism that produced geometric or figurative images, influenced by the echoes we have already described. Aloni then went through his first naturalistic period, followed by an informal period and, during recent years; with the advent of post-modernism, he has planned and carried out exhaustive experiments with his own expressions of figurative images that favour large formats representing groups of figures, interior scenes, houses and perspectives of nature, and which, as Paolo Levi wrote, “are enlivened by a decisive chromaticism and by a polished clearness, geometric and composite”. Thus just as Paul Klee was a figurative artist who, while making use of abstract techniques never abandoned reality, Aloni has persevered with this choice, which highlights the colour, the light, the architectural forms, the individual points, the lines and the plastic surfaces of space. All of these are part of those essential qualities that combine in a painting to represent the images, both invented and natural, with the intention of producing an aesthetic harmony and of giving an idea of an individual expression that wants and intends to find its own language of communication. The artist’s latest work, which on this occasion we present at the “Galleria Il Castello” in Via Brera, Milan, as a whole presents an unnaturalistic chromatic fusion, with colour tones that inter-marry and, being born in the inner nature of the artist, reveal is personal vision of the atmosphere with surprising results.

The visitor should not be taken in by the artist’s vision that here is presented with false simplicity, since in reality the compositions are highly refined, sophisticated, full of mystery. A good example of this, which also serves as an extremely indicative aspect, can be seen in a curious representation of an environment containing a large number of doors, all of which are open, that produces a surprising impact that makes one think of an unstables situation, the very opposite of a closed environment that habitually makes one feel protected. In the intention of the artist we can see that abandonment by man towards the events that highlight the precariousness of our present, and in the painting these are clearly represented by the images of the open doors.

Following the cultural trends, Aloni points us to the motifs that acquire in themselves, almost by magic, an ambiguous dimension, just as our life in the present, which does not offer any future prospects, is ambiguous, everything seems to be protected and the only hypotheses that accompany us like a delirium are virtual, forgetting what we used to be in our past. Thus everything apparently is open, everything is possible and mysterious. In reality we are constantly accompanied, from our very beginning to our possible end, by the dogmas of life and death.

The mystery of our existential journey is still represented by the unknown quantities of the planets situated in a sideral universe, whose very presence excites our curiosity and renews those questions that continue to form the basis of our existential condition: Who are we? Where do we come from?
Where are we going?

The lack of clarifying answers to our questions forces our rationalism, over and beyond beliefs, to consider our lives as having no possible prospects of a solution and, in this order of ideas, the artists in our age registers these phenomena that give his work a metaphysical base, accompanied by disturbing and anguished sentiments. Man lives, thinks and expresses himself in a mysterious universe that is itself not capable of providing him with answers that explain the reason for his existential presence. Nature is silent and solicits considered attention . With his imagination Aloni has captured all of these problems, and as an artist he has developed images that reflect this collection. Even his feminine images appear to converse with the silence, in a padded world that does not provide any answers.

Is, therefore, that consoling aspiration of man that longed for omniscience and accompanied the Faustian dreams of the Enlightenment movement really exhausted?

Everything today leads to agitation and drama, and maybe this is the real collective reason that is pushing our society towards irrational and dangerous risks, such as those that have shattered the equilibrium of our planet and the hopes of its people. Heisemberg once noted that: “the subject of our research is no longer simply nature and its phenomena, examined and evaluated within themselves, but rather nature offered to man’s anguished interrogation which, somehow, can help man to distance himself from his planetary solitude that has no boundaries”, and today this observation is also valid for art.