“FEAR”

A few years ago Cormac McCarthy * wrote a small jewel of a book, a novel, well written, without pretentious language, with a linear plot and just long enough that it could be read during a medium length trip. In the beginning, the theme is mysterious but with the turning of the pages, gradually becomes glaringly clear to the eyes and hungry minds of those who eagerly seek answers and- why not- the solutions, at the outset of the story.

David Binello proceeds with the same delicate direction, presenting for the first time the 6 unreleased videos titled "FEAR". Short but cuttingly powerful episodes broadcast with stubborn clarity, the anxiety derived from yet another systematic, environmental catastrophe. While not a linear narrative, the videos observed in a captivating and mysterious sequence, generate a cryptic and, at the same time, attractive symphony so as to convey the impression of being part of the same movie.

The scenario, worthy of the best theater of the absurd, and the minimal action, catapult the viewer into a half-real dimension which at the end of the series takes on universal forms and flavors, purged from all affectation and aesthetic charms and distractions, and becomes pure feeling.

The ecological disasters created by war, industrial accidents, from the careless hands of those who always want to “have”, regardless of the consequences, lead the artist to prophetic visions that are not very far from those that are often imagined in literature and cinema. The site-specific installation of the videos is completed by two male figures, dummies, coming out of the screen and that stand as guardians and witnesses at the end of an open path.

Seduced by the subtle atmosphere- first by an alienating rhythm and sound (a dramatic memory of the radiation released at the Fukushima nuclear power plant following the nuclear disaster) and then, harrowing music- the viewer is left to cope with their own emotional world and coming to terms with their own conscience.

* Cormac McCarthy, The Road, Einaudi, 2007, (winner James Tait Black Memorial Award 2006 and Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2007)

Monica Trigona

The cosmos and the vineyard of Davide Binello: cosmic sequences as precious Wittgensteinian propositions

I. The cosmos and the vineyard

The pictorial cosmos and the pictorial vineyard of Davide Binello are a single thing, although in this essay, I will have to limit myself to just the cosmic representations. They deserve attention, equal attention, not only for their inexpressible poetry and delicateness but also for their problematic and piercing actuality. It is – and I must confess (and, thus, express my debt to my young and brilliant colleague) – thanks to Monica Trigona that I was able to make this discovery, by which I mean to say, the discovery of this aloof artist. It was a discovery that was as unexpected as it was revelatory, with a wealth of values, flavours and, thus, wisdom, as Roland Barthes would say. Because Binello is an artist that, more than aloof, is difficult to intercept and reach. He a secret artist, who flees – literally: he flees and avoids the current mainstream of Italian art, deliberately eluding it, not only because he is shy, but also because he voluntarily refuses, out of obvious repulsion, certain situations, which are taken too much for granted, and compromises of the contemporary art system.
His pictorial cosmos has roots as remote as the vineyard that, more unique than rare, is dual-faceted: on the one hand, it is a magnificent metaphor and represents, especially when it is translated into a work of art, the entire Greco-Latin tradition, in short, our very historical-cultural roots, with all its wisdom and emblematic rituals and, finally, recalls, evoking its mythopoeic memory, the very origins of painting as handed down to us by the Greek philosophers; on the other hand, this vineyard is rather a factual reality that produces an excellent niche wine, cared for with passion and unusual skill by the artist who finds in it the flow of ancient time and past seasons, the always delicate encounter with the moon and other stars. Note that the linguistic allusions just made to the universe of Galileo's world have ample reason to be made, as we will soon see.
Because Davide Binello is a full-range artist both when he paints and when he makes his wine. The vineyard is Binello's “holy of holies”, the place where the artist meditates and observes his starry vault and, at the same time, a place where he communes with the earth and nature that he equally loves. The vineyard is his refuge of choice before he puts his hand to his artistic creations, whether vineyards or cosmogonies.
Davide Binello – it worth stating the fact – produces his creations in a unique shed that he built with his own hands behind the house, but he often works literally among his beloved vines. Whether they are dealing with a vine or the slice of sky that rises above it. It is, thus, his universal orientation that so often induces him to represent the universal world, as Vico would say, and that has stimulated him to study the history of the noble art of viticulture interweaving it with that of the cosmogony and the observation and measurement of the stars, let us say, from the time of the primeval scientific observations made millennia ago in the basin of the Indus, in Egypt, in the Sumerian delta, which finds immediate acknowledgement and even full reflection in his art. And profound motivations in it.
In fact, here he finds the result of both wine-making and cosmogony, roots and fruits that are both metaphorical and real, articulated as representations that are composed, calculated and rhythmic and, at bottom, infused with their quiet poetry. And, finally, he achieves, partly deriving it from his own attachment to the vineyards, from the slow and incessant work of wine-making that he also performs, beyond the passion and knowledge that drives him, the effort of communicating-diffusing a particular kind of philosophising, a particular mode of understanding the natural world and its laws, the entire cosmos captured through another way of seeing, understanding and savouring every thing. This latter, a result that, finally, finds its own acknowledgement in the delicate “craft” of the artist.

II. Artistic Wittgesteinian propositions: the cosmic sequences

I can say this after carefully examining his creations, these works of his that are, for the most part in black and white, that construct portions of universe, with its constellations (evoking, from afar, the well-known Constellations of Joan Mirò, to only mention one name from our artist's possible references), its black holes, its dense galaxies that are animated by geometric and free lines, of spaces that are, at the same time, measurable and fantastic. These cosmogonies by Binello articulate precise geometric patterns within which clumps of chromatic-material anarchy explode, as often happens with Spatialists and Nuclearists, and principles similar to those of the pioneering work of Lucio Fontana in the Forties and Fifties of the 20th century, not to mention those reiterating forms achieved by Capogrossi, the early Burri and a few others. And there is also, it should be quietly added, some even subtler references to the abstract Expressionism of Pollock, even more remotely, to certain examples of afigural and material-lyrical art by Newman and other American artists, but filtered, metabolised and kept at a due distance much more than his Italian precursors.
They are all deliberate references, precisely sought by Binello, naturally, even if subtracted, deliberately veiled and set apart in the urgency of starting over, of an actualisation that diverges from these, albeit high models and creates an entirely other way of planning, feeling and working. For Davide Binello it is an actualisation that takes concrete form in a scientificness that is not at all alien to these antecedents, here entrusted, it should be clarified, to geometric games that comprise the weft on which he creates a composition that I could compare to a sonata punctuated by pauses and cadenced, loose rhythms, now symmetrical, now unsymmetrical, in every case constructed in the rigour of perceptual equilibriums (of which both Gombrich and Arnheim have written at length) or, on the contrary, suddenly lacking any logic and, instead, animated by Jazz-style improvisations, or even worse, possessed by the wind of a tempest.  
In my view, Davide Binello a really interesting and unique artist precisely in the terms in which he produces his cosmogonies. Cosmic representations that manifest a complexity that is unthinkable for a first effort, that display a disarming simplicity or spontaneity in a new artist and, at the same time, are audacious inventions. If you know how to look at them (and I say this with reference to a magnificent essay from the Thirties by Matteo Marangoni), Binello does very fine work with the skill and delicateness of a wine-maker. In fact, these cosmic metonymies seem to be prepared with conscious passion of a wine-maker; through these singular cosmogonies of his, he seems to give substance and artistic embodiment to a philosophy that is absolutely unique. Or, better yet: there is a cognitive act in his creations that feed a certain lyric and contemplative impulse without sliding into irrationality. Because, here, even the most uncontrolled and impulsive or anarchic gesture is justified and the fruit of thought and a profound cosmological knowledge.
So, on a par with the simple and direct gesture of a wine-maker who prunes vines without error, eliminating the bad shoots, strengthening the bunch destined for harvest, with apparent spontaneity, the artists casts his material thicknesses, draws his cosmic lines and measures every detail of the representation with his eye and hand.
In other words, I would be tempted to say that, in these pictorial black and white cosmogonies, as an impulse of the timeless lesson of Galileo, Davide Binello seems to create images that reflect several of the propositions of one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century, Ludwig Wittgenstein. In his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (unpublished until 1921 and, since then, the object of repeated study) structured in hierarchical propositions, he argues that: “The image is a fact” (2.141); “It is a ruler put to reality” (2.1521). And again: “The fact, to be an image, must have something in common with what is portrayed” (2.16). For this reason, it is reasonable to agree that: “What the image must have in common with reality, in order to represent it – correctly or falsely – in its own way, is the representational shape of the image”.
Like Galileo, Binello conducts studies and celestial observations and draws images in respect to what was said above, giving form to his cosmic sequences. But “The image represents its object from outside (its point of view is its form and representation) and, for this reason, the image represents its object correctly or falsely” (2.173), Wittgenstein reminds us, which is the reason why we must look at the ways in which its constructor, Davide Binello, creates this cosmic image, repeating it in unequal sequences, collecting it within different formats, but always maintaining a rhythm, a narrative timbre that, in some way, corresponds to a mythopoeic song.
He well knows, like the philosopher, that “The image cannot, however, place itself outside of its own form of representation”. (2.174) For this reason, Binello has, over time, created in his experimental, self-taught way, his own “way of doing” and he has fine-tuned his own “form” that is congruent and correlated to it, and, finally, with his latest creations, has been able to construct his own inimitable “form of representation”. But that's not enough. If it is true that “Every image is also a logical image. (On the other hand, for example, every image is not a spatial image)”. (2.182) it is here that one must reflect further precisely in regard to the space that exists in these creations, in these cosmic sequences by Davide Binello, in his black and white cosmogonies: a space that is not only visual but also sound, since it contains a musical spirit. It is also, obviously, true that “The logical image can portray a world” (2.19) and that “The image has portrayed the logical form of representation” (2.2), but it is, likewise, true that Binello's images represent, also with Wittgenstein, “a possible situation in logical space” (2.202). It is of little important if the representation is true or false, since they provide a concrete representation that is, in itself, correct, i.e., respectful of its own rules and methods of implementation.
The Wittgensteinian reference is all in this and in the final result offered by the works: not an accidental or irrational and emotive superficial image of the world universe but rather a logical construction that, as such, is also harmonic and, thus, cosmogonic in its own sense and constitutes an authentic cognitive or sapiential act. So, is the artist a philosopher and educator? And again, every sentence of this cosmogony through images is shrouded in an explicit lyricism or poeticism emanated not only from a thought, from a conscious way of doing filled with knowledge, but also from a way of feeling that is the harbinger of a sentiment, since the artist is stimulated by the knowledge and is guided in his “way of doing” by the dual functor of logic and tenderness.

Rolando Bellini

Davide Binello’s Astral Painting

“Painting is a blind man's profession. A person doesn’t paint what he sees, but what he feels, what he tells himself about what he has seen.”
Starting from this sentence from Picasso, Davide Binello takes the brush and speaks of cosmos, where space categories loose their consistence, while the sidereal depths and the celestial phenomena represent the sensitive processes of human acquisition and learning.
His cosmic tales let the eye lose and enter little by little into a fantastic net of straight lines which unravel  sometimes on soft and smooth surfaces; sometimes on rough and pitted ones.
The first reproduce the phase of  a star life, from the assembling of cosmic gases to its final phase, with the explosion of “supernova” ; the others reproduce the red volcanic magma, the solfataras that puff, the periodic eruptions of geyser’s gas.
The emphasized sign denies every shape explicitly and with it the rational knowledge that comes out, but this is not so important: passions, anxiety and fears must, therefore, be expressed in the most  spontaneous, free and violent way.
Organic shapes  hard to classify, get consistency,  against their will, and objects of  mysterious nature alternate  in compositions with very vitalistic aesthetics, marked by a full-bodied and rich oil. In this continuous flowering of shapes and colours, signs and gestures, sketches and voluptuous evolutions,  we cannot avoid thinking of art as mother of never-ending possibilities

Monica Trigona