Beyond the frame

Aniello D’Iorio/Translation from Italian by Cecilia Fiermonte

 

Usually, artists portray the drive, the love, the passion, the desire, the pain and other feelings that touch our lives. It is a type of egoism that, sometimes, draws in the viewers of their work, other times it misses, not inspiring feeling, nor even sparking interest. The lack of engagement of an exhibition visitor can be readily seen: he browses the works, seemingly beautiful or not, without establishing any discourse, not even with himself, not posing questions, not having, in this way, any appreciation for the artist’s effort to communicate.

With his work, Damiano Durante does something more in order to strike the visitor; it is largely didactic: he invites one to go beyond the narrow space of the canvas, openly stimulating reflection, his realistic technique expressing symbolic content that is an actual inspiration to the visitor. The fusion of symbols, in art, as in cinematography, the photograph and the painting, help the mind enter the physical reality of the representation, almost completing the artist’s work, in that way constructing a discourse within the environment of the painting.

The power of Durante’s painting, on closer examination, concretely touches the five senses: water comes alive and almost takes on consistency, a glass in fragments evokes the sound of shattering, the light in a candle expands beyond its own physical presence, the clinging bodies leads one to understand the feeling of an embrace, a half-empty bottle recalls hidden feelings.

Durante’s still-lifes are more than alive, the physical becomes eternal, the past links to the present, the future is a flower already blossomed. The looming darkness recalls the vulnerability of human existence, the need to search for a universal connection in which doubt and certainty can coexist, the light and dark, water and light, life beyond every form.