THE WORLD-WORKS OF ENRICO T. According to M. Gerstenkorn's calculations, developed by H. Alfven, Earth's continents are nothing less than moon fragments fallen on our planet. Originally, the moon itself was a planet gravitating around the sun up until the moment in which Earth's closeness derailed its orbit. Captured by Earth's gravitation, the moon pulled nearer and nearer clenching its orbit around us. At a certain moment the mutual attraction began to deforrn the surface of the two celestial bodies, raising very high waves from which fragments broke off, whirling in the space between the Earth and the moon. Mostly fragments of lunar matter that ended up falling on the Earth. Consequentially, due to tidal influence, the moon was then forced away until reaching its present orbit. A part of the lunar mass, perhaps half, remained on the Earth, forming the continents. Looking at the most recent paintings of Enrico T. De Paris, the first tale of one of Calvino's books comes to my mind , "Ti con zero". The one which starts with the mentioned passage and that deals with the time when the Earth's crust was an unceasing extension of nylon, chrome-steal, ducotone (...), asphalt, amiantus, cement" , in short, nothing natural. Then the moon, which is instead a green planet of waters and lands came nearer. And there, we, terrestrial people, I mean, find tons of chlorophyll, dew, and nitrogen substances upon ourselves. And for hundreds of thousands of centuries we have been trying to get free of it all in order to rebuild the primitive, huge extension of plastic, sheet metal and cement. In some of Enrico T.'s paintings the Earth seems painted just like that, a moment before nature plummits upon it from the moon: deformed by the irresistible attaction, skyscrapers blast-off like rockets, magnetic waves so strong, becoming visible. The colours are acid, shiny, as a synthetic planet ought to be. There is no trace of human presence, but perhaps everybody is at home looking out of their windows at what the hell is going on. In his fantastic cosmology, Calvino alternates, according to a successfirl definition of Vittorini, "fairy-tale charged realism" and "realism-charged fairy-tales" , building tales of pure rythm, where reality is stylized and deformed in few lines. The possible datum is developed to the most impossible of impossibilities. Also Enrico's cities fianction
according to this mechanism. The movement of imagination
starts from the world, but seeing it with different eyes: it is still real and already
something else. Images translate an experience, but they mean more and on a different
level. E.T. De Paris often uses the word "SYMBOL". And so we can call them like
that, these imagined images, symbols; and voilą, these symbols start living, developing
their own logic. They bring with them a net-work of events; they impose their tone, their
language which "aims at favouring - as Enrico writes me - not so much the reception
of a definite meaning, but rather a glow of possible meanings, all equally imprecise and
equally valid, according to the degree of perspicacity, hypersensitivity and sentimental
disposition of men". Certainly, a great deal of the origin of these images is made by
colour, I mean colour as the matter of painting, soft, thick, shiny and fascinating, to
dip one's paintbrush and make it go without ever stopping and trying everything, all the
techniques, modes and expressions. Why not? Everything within the same painting, to give
it the same sound of the world, an impression of accumulation, a stream of different
sensations, constant and very quick. The initial idea knows how to get distracted from the
matter and get involved in the joy of painting. It slips out of your's hands, and to
follow it you have to paint and paint. As Nicola De Maria says - and I am not mentioning
him by chance, but because I believe that their works have something in common - " it
is impossible to stop, you have to paint night and day, leaving the passionate
paint-brushes go on ahead, alone, and follow this hungerless and tire-less
inspiration...". Enrico often talks about positiveness, about love for life in
constant movement. Words that leave out the history violence, ugliness and sorrow. He
thinks that the art work must carry illuminating signals, and take from the world the
unlimited hints for smiling at life, that painting should be, first off all, a moving
gesture. I do not believe in naivety as the founding quality of the artist's myth. I think
, instead, that it declares the responsability of communicating a value of positive
energy. The responsability of an art that expresses its own projet about the world talking
about beauty and harmony. I mean a new beauty and a new harmony that live in chaos and
noise. On the contrary, I can not stop thinking with anguish about the present. However, I
feel the beauty of chaos, its possibilities, the different, changeable,. contradictory
combinations it contains. A fashionable word that we could use is "coexistence",
to talk about how many different things live together today and the boundaries among them
seem indefinite, temporary. De Paris' s painting also talks about this not only when he
puts together signs, styles and different techniques within the same painting, or when he
plays with comic-strips or with illustration, or even when he makes an incursion, as he
says, "In the spectacular slang of the present". His paintings tell the beauty
of chaos especially with the system of moving relations that builds where privileged or
central points of view do not exist, where there is neither before, nor after, but a
continuous present, as a ring (loop) that wealds ideas, projets and experiences together.
Even the conceptual scale of his work continuously slides: on one hand, he talks about
truth and beauty; on the other, the humour and the irony of his little houses re-conduct
the sublime universe of colour back to a more daily world, reachable by the senses,
recognizable. In the same way, also the operative scale, in which Enrico T. works, varies
in the relationship between his small canvases, the polyptyches and the polyptyches that
become walls, rooms, houses, inhabitable painting, worldworks*, to steal an expression I
like. World-works then, and again the house is like the world, the place to stay, to live;
it is a tangible and physically complete universe, a shelter, a maternal womb, an
extension made unlimited by fantasy. It is to travel without moving, because, De Maria
says again, "Art really gives you the world tour". Cristiana Perrella
* World-works is the title of one of Franco Moretti's books published by Einaudi in 1994.
from "LOOP" Enrico Tommaso De Paris by Cristiana Perrella & Luca Beatrice
Edition In Arco Gallery - Turin (Italy) 1995