ORIGINARY PHLEGRAEAN FIELDS

by Alice Granger

To listen to Ferdiando Ambrosino's multi-coloured painting, it is interesting to place some of the paintings of his youth alongside his recent work.

The constant stands out straight away, as does the transformation under the force of an influence we want to question. There is a very strong impression, in front of these canvases, of nothing lost, of always the same, precisely through Ambrosino's particular and specific colours, the Phlegraean colours of his originary land.

A constant of colours belonging to these volcanic lands, and to the sea, which thrust themselves out of the shadow, out of the dark and the greyness. Above all there is a fiery-red glowing of a sibylline painting, which has come out of this region of Cuma. And always the light of this region, warm and joyful beyond the dark and the greyness, placid in the dark blue and light blue. Volcanic lands, in the same way that colours are often volcanic. A metaphor of drive.

Like in the painting Spring in Cuma (1967). There is no representation in Ambrosino's painting. On the contary, the canvases of his youth, for instance those in which the Impressionist influence is legible, recount that something immemorial destroys representation, prevents Realism. Rather than talk of an Impressionist style, let us listen to the immemorial impression that imprints itself on the canvas, that imposes itself victoriously over any vision.

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