MUSING ABOUT MOVIEMAKING

The making of EDOnism can be defined as a kind of gestation, considering that about 9 months have passed between the first outline and the end of the post-production period. During this arc of time a lot of ideas, coincidences, revelations and unforeseen events contributed to the uniqueness of the movie. It has been a grand scale effort propelled by the target of finalizing a project that at the beginning could sound utopist, if compared to the very limited range of technical and financial resources at our disposal. Although the thematic root of the story derived from the seismic emergency that unfortunately characterized the 2009 here in Abruzzo (that’s still a dramatic issue on these days), the earthquake phenomenon doesn’t represent an excuse to give to the movie a more humanitarian or social appeal, as some documentaries and movies have done after the disaster. Indeed, what interested me most was to give a poetic representation to the link between the inner realm of human soul and the enigmatic exterior world, a theme that has been often at the core of my previous movies (as well as paintings and novels). Somehow the earthquake becomes the symbolic projection of a human interior cataclysm, an extraordinary event subverting the concept of reality, slowly getting wider proportions and involving the entire community of a city. Tokyo provided a colossal set to the movie, an emotive environment that neither digital effects nor scenography will ever be able to reproduce with the same visual power, offering the perfect physical backdrop to the metaphysical journey of the protagonist. Indeed its breathtaking amount of details properly evoked the hyper realistic visionary ambiance that I imagined while I was writing the script.
I’d like to dedicate Edonism not only to all the victims of earthquakes, but also to the people still trying to restore their humanity among the ruins of their soul.

http://www.edonism-movie.com

The breath of William Kurelek

I think it's a pity that nowadays the name of this talented and visionary artist survives just in Canada. The story of my obsession for William Kurelek dated to the discovery of his masterwork "The Maze" that happened accidentally when I was a child reading a large book about psychiatry belonging to a friend of my father. The detailed and disturbing sagittal representation of a human skull full of boxes containing small iconic scenes (reminiscent of those ones depicted by Magritte, Ernst and Dali) impressed me so deeply that I couldn't forget it for a long while, even if I wasn't able to know who was the painter since the book didn't provide the name of the author. The mistery enveloping both the painting theme and its creator boosted even more my fascination for the image. Somehow his Bosh-like and bruegelesque taste reminded me an intense state of mind I perceived when I was very young staring at the little figures on the basement of an old globe in my house.
Accidentally the last year I found again the same large book in the house of a friend of mine, but this time I checked out the illustration references at the end of the volume and, following the several clues on the web, I finally managed to find his name. Since then I studied his life reading rare canadian books and discovered further impressive pictures and drawings he made during the period he spent at the London Maudsley Hospital when he painted "The Maze".
I started to paint this picture while I was simply musing about all the ancient feelings I recovered when I found again that gruesome Kurelek's self-portrait. I cannot explain rationally why I paint this urban landscape. All in all, showing what you cannot express through words and logic, might be the reason paintings are made for...