Patchwork in acid sauce

Andy’s painting is an Lsd painting on canvass. It is a visionary flight, without parachute, through a parallel reality that resembles the known one, but does not reproduces it. The young artist from Brianza starts from daily landscapes – from street furniture, from corners he continuously hangs out at and perfectly knows, from friends’ faces and even too famous, hair-sprayed and sometimes indigestible characters, directly coming from the star-system and from the gummy world of cartoons – to get soon to an acid, deformed, psychedelic universe where landscapes and presences are of hallucinatory character, where vibrations and vertigo have taken the place of tranquillity, reiterating action and safety. As in a recreated world, seen through special 3D glasses (in which exploded and resounding colours cubistically give volume to the image) the horizon shades turn out to be changed and aggressive, the contours of faces and objects appear nervous and syncopated, the perspective frames are uncertain, elusive and they twist, colours exaggerate.

Andy’s surreal and oneiric world seems to be seen through the eyes of Cesar, the spirited somnambulist of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligaris (true cinematographic manifesto of German Expressionism). Only, while in the historical film by Robert Wiene the exasperation of landscapes, characters and atmospheres was entrusted to a livid and contrasted black and white, in Andy’s works his visionary folly and his oneiric imagination turn out to be made of exasperated chromatic tones. From red to green, from fuchsia to orange, from yellow to electric blue, every shade explodes in his hands, it becomes domineering and extreme, it attacks the viewer, trying to excel the others. So his compositions turn out to seem crazed collages, movable and vibrating mosaics in which, instead of blending and matching, parts and backgrounds are alive with contrasts, trying to excel one another.

Nothing is as it seems to be, logic is subverted, gravity has disappeared and everything has been brought to extreme consequences.

A parallel place recalling the real world, evidently related to it, a place you can find only with a stiff dose of bravery and folly, after passing through the looking glass. Or after freeing your fantasy and giving vent to your dreams. Like Dick Van Dike’s chimney sweeper in Mary Poppins, who plunges into the images drawn on the pavement and then starts singing the famous Supercalifragilisticexpialidocius, or like Eddie Valiant, the private detective of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? who, on his logorrheic taxi, can get right into Toontown Square and can afford to fall from the ninetieth floor of a skyscraper without even scratching himself. So Andy animates, walks and lives places, characters, landscapes in which everything is allowed and every situation looks plausible: Pollon and Lum share the canvass with a super top model; a Porche is together with a parrot; a road sign with Milo’s Venus. Andy leads us hand in hand to a fantastic horizon where unreality looks real, where usual perspectives follow opposite and different paths. On his canvass landscapes and figures roll up, become elastic, soft, gummy. Following the footsteps of the most alert Italian television, like Blob and Fuori Orario, the artist steals from legends and history, he takes from memories and imagery, he catches from illustration and reality, and than shakes everything into a psychedelic and phantasmagorical vision, astonishing and restless.

He starts with a finicking search on the forms and iconography of a subject, on the meanings and the attitude of a character, on the nature and behaviours of a historical, mystical, legendary figure. Then he began composing, as if it was music. As sound samples are fractions of manipulated reality, then sequenced, so in his paintings Andy captures a snapshot, a flashback and then replaces it in a surreal viewpoint.      

Emotions, experiences and colours live in a lucid and at the same time chaotic dimension. Where seemingly disconnected characters become symbols of concepts to express. A neopop collage (one eye on Warhol, the other on Haring), a huge patchwork in acid sauce, a poetic made of fragments, of stories that begun and never ended, of flashes coming directly from the Eighties and from the life of a thirty-five years old artist.

Like blotting paper, Andy’s painting catches and picks up from the memory box: a pure distillate of art, music, and show.

There are all the New Wave and Avant Pop singers, from the Joy Division to the Kraftwerk, from Robert Smith to the Devo, and then Nico, Sid Vicious, Jimi Hendrix, Annie Lennox, Madonna, the Kiss, Jim Morrison, and then again the Pet Shop Boys, immortalized in the video of their greatest hit, Go West, the genius of David Bowie, portrayed by the artist in any of his versions, from the glam one of Aladdin Sane to the Berliner one of Low. Rock and show business myths (Marylin Monroe and Ava Gardner), but also cartoons, Andy rediscovers the characters who impressed his childhood: the ones made in Japan like Captain Harlok, Goldrake, Lum, Pollon, Lupin, Pac Man and the French ones like Asterix and Barbapapa. He puts them on the canvass side by side with beautiful and a little retro women, or with top models like Kate Moss and Linda Evangelista. And then, between a tribute to the Japanese femininity (and its very sensual geishas) and another to vips like Lady D and Condoleeza Rice, Andy throws his mysticism in, made of psychedelic Jesuses and pop Madonnas. As in a kind of diary where he can take notes, the artist succeeds in compressing multiple characters and situations. Colours are always acid, fluorescent, a fist in the eye, backgrounds are careful and precise, a defined stroke, marked, icy, reflective, that does not admit blurs.

And yet, there’s something more. Maybe colours are the ones of a fun fair, maybe it all looks like some games and decorations, but the most profound sense of this research deeply digs into the confusion of today’s myths and values, into the difficulty of reading and pondering the past, into the inconsistencies and contradictions of contemporary knowledge. Very coloured, citationist and paradoxical, Andy’s research is falsely childish, falsely glamorous, falsely amused.

It’s a huge puzzle, a difficult construction to decode. It’s like a beautiful woman wearing a showy dress, hiding so much more under it. Shocking and original, his art is a very subtle game of references, overlaps and betrayals between what’s evidently shown and what stands behind the scenes. Andy makes his painting take a deep breath of oxygen because he frees it from the slavery of logic, from the oppression of the target at all costs. Lived as an immersion into the absurd, as an apnoea into one’s passions and memories, art does no more interpret reality, it does not restrict itself in giving an explanation of it: on the contrary it lives it again, transforms it, chews it.