Vitali's latest Still lives had already stated it. At that point, objects were only an excuse, and the real subject was the wall: what lies under the artist's eyes fuses with its surroundings allowing backgrounds to become the pure essence of what is represented.
One can recognize the old walls that served both as an outline to the previous still lives, and as a support to shredded posters. One can take a glance at the shadows from the "musical" compositions that Vitali painted on his canvas with accuracy and precision. These compositions can be recognized and simultaneously remain unrecognizable, concealed in a color whirlpool that seems to have engulfed every single shade in order to produce one elusive one.
Bidimensionality disappears along with the last fragments of papers and posters pasted on the walls, it is engorged by the canvas, and the only present width is the mere color, which is sometimes mixed with sand and vigorously applied to the coarse jute fibers before it is finally scraped, almost as a gesture of liberation from an art that has nothing else to say, crystallized in a sort of perfection that could not express the artist's emotions, his yearnings and his rage. Figures cannot reappear in these works, and if they do they are deformed, lured into imperfection so that they cannot be related anymore to an artistic period that has already been concluded. There is nothing in Vitali's canvases, and yet something is always visible to the eye: a memory, an incitement an allusion to some object that once existed but has now dissolved in the absolute vagary of the mind.

October 15th, 2008

Carlo Vitali, in one definite move has for some time now abandoned his research on the 'Still Life' painting to dedicate himself to more abstract themes. The "liberating gesture", which gave birth to the need for a type of painting that separates itself further and further from the imitation of reality was undoubtedly a disruptive move: the artist, leaving aside his beloved objects placed artfully in the studio, is now captivated by the cracked city walls, stained with mold and furrows, which he interprets on the canvas with careful sensitivity. His rough and plastic surfaces are etched by multiple minute marks, which seem to represent real objects from afar, but melted and incorporated in the magma of soft-toned hues, delicate, buttery, sometimes separated by fields of primary colours. Scratches, synthetic figures and tearings that evolve from the memory are designed to create sensations of harmony, without indulging in the polemic, provocative and violent attitudes that constitute the backbone of the abstract painting. Perhaps the fragments of reality that surface in his paintings are to be interpreted as a final need for expression, only to mitigate the profound impulse towards a complete non-objectivity. In the paintings of Carlo Vitali the aggressive force is softened and has become a delicate yet raw hint of meaning, not screamed but whispered gently, mitigated by the need for perfection that leads the artist to return several times to the canvas with scratches, gouges , tiny collages, so that the journey into his inner self is prolonged in time.

Septembre 15th, 2011