“As all young poets are forever describing, nature and in order to match the shade of green precisely he looked at the thing itself, which happened to be a laurel bush growing beneath the window. After that, of course, he could write no more. Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces. The shade of green Orlando now saw spoilt his rhyme and split his metre”.
To introduce Nino De Luca, I borrowed this passage from Virginia Woolf's Orlando, because in it the English writer poses one of the fundamental problems of modern art: the relationship between saying and seeing, between language and feeling. For Woolf, as for Nietzsche, there is a direct relationship between art and the word that describes it, by putting the seeing, the experience of the senses, in the background. Also for Heidegger, the language of speech does not relate to seeing, but directly to the thing seen as it is in its own being. Speech language, saying, has its own intrinsic visibility. The word shows the thing, it makes it see. Art and space are, primarily, exercise of listening to the word.
Nino De Luca seems to want to be in a different territory.
In fact, whoever crosses that wave of intense overflowing colour of his canvases immediately plunges into the field of primary emotions; A very deep sea that is not frightening despite promising many pitfalls. A sea in which the artist seems to move without anguish, even when he plunges into his own existential abyss, which is that of everyone, the tragic nature of the human vicissitude. That orange stain repeated in several canvases, perhaps is the sign of a difference, of an uniqueness.
Thus, Nino De Luca's works are characterised by an extremely refined chromatic balance, which we sense is achieved after a tour de force of endless backgrounds, experimentation with techniques, additions and subtractions of several materials and supports, and always aimed at a relentless search of essential. Nino De Luca openly declares what he is doing with his painting in constant search of the limit, that elusive borderline between water or earth and sky. Moreover, his art works, thus solving the problem that plagued Orlando, convey this to an observer who cannot read the meaning of the (few) signifying elements scattered across the canvas.
A visit at his studio in Rome, “the Castelli palace” can fully explain Nino De Luca's poetics. He paints what he paints also because he does it there and nowhere else, a place that lives alone and belongs entirely to the daylight, invading every space in the hours that nature grants it. Light, the parent and vehicle of our deepest emotions.
In what hollow shall I hide my soul
so that your absence remains unseen
that like a terrible Sun, without sunset,
shines definitively and ruthlessly?
Your absence surrounds me
like a string round my throat,
the sea to which it sinks…
(Jorge Luis Borges)
And what if the sinking, a specific feature of some of De Luca's works, is not an accidental shipwreck of a physical body or of our spirit, but instead a decisive desire to lose oneself, to make our traces disappear and hide among the sweetest and most unspeakable of our thoughts, to mark one's differences and reconstruct a different reality, a 'new existential world', in which to live by experimenting?
After all, we only proceed with attemps….