AFAN's Easter egg

AFan's Easter egg (2003-2017) #archive #store #canvas #painting #oilpainting #fineart #oil #artwork #mutation #metamorphosis #Easter #egg #detail #landscape

A post shared by AFan Alessandro Fantini (@afanmultimedianic) on Apr 16, 2017 at 8:04am PDT

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...

Flaming tune

From time to time I need to clean the palette. The day the oil color incrustation begins to resemble a Pollock's delirium or a Burri's patchwork I've to baptize this morbid orogenic surface with sprays of alcool and waves of fire. When the matter becomes soft again I scrape it off with my putty knife. It's a hard and stressing physical work, but the feeling is very close to a sensual act. It simbolically forebodes the upcoming creative challenge of the large canvas, just like the alchemic "Genesis in test-tube" described by J. C. Barchusen in his book "Elementa chemicae", during which Azoth is put many times inside the bottle together with the fire in order to let the soul oozing.