Arboreal

Pipani's poetics move through a universe of signs and visual traces in the attempt to entrust all the reality of the living to a graphic-pictorial distillate, which constantly varies and becomes swift as a calligraphy. Eroded sentences, words left behind and surfaces, from which a faint shimmer comes to light, are enveloped in a rarefied and opalescent light which is the silent cognitive protagonist of all his work. A strong idea of unity is dominant in his pieces; the tension of writing, that is both nourishment and instrument of contamination, goes hand in hand with the breath and space of painting and sign. Every single opportunity becomes, for the artist, on the one hand concentration and elaboration to stimulate perceptive faculties and, on the other hand, a motivation for an emotional and intellectual stream. Writing is thus an attempt to give meaning to the visual experience, since in Art, everything is both hidden and manifest at the same time.

Pipani is successful in doing it by employing a narration made of words and images, pushing all forms of expression to intangible thresholds where matter constantly dissolves and the depth of memory and perception becomes subtle epiphanies, fragments, visual deformations, places of uncertainty and enigma. Maybe those flashes of color, sometimes surfacing the mixture of pigments and gauzes, that covers entirely the surfaces, are only a pretext to shatter the prevailing monochrome. Exactly like what happens on foggy winter days on the beach of his homeland, a place Pipani is far from forgetting, but that instead, he loves to reminisce in his tying the seafaring roots and humble crafts of his heritage.

His work on paper becomes then a privileged ground, along with all the other supports such as boards, tarlatans, plates and acetates which represent an ample array of possibilities exactly like the page itself, onto which Pipani, with controlled urge, lavishes his energy and feelings, pushing disciplinary limits away and diving into visual codes with the clear intention of subverting them. The written words then come to the surface like etchings on the skin of time, which in turn slides on the supports, flooding out onto the walls, while the mineral sign left by the pencil or pigments on the paper holds an uneven and elegant map, the same as the hidden life it evokes.

Directions are scorching and wide open even in the choices the artist made in the installation of his show in Gatteo at the San Rocco Oratory where Pipani fully captured the last border of the real.

Each single tree is the mirror of a soul, each sign equals a name, a memory, and a journey for those who have drowned in the Mediterranean contemporary holocaust.

It is an alphabet of expectations which soften the losses and disappointments one may encounter in life.