Since it is I who paints these pictures it is true that they are portraits of myself. However - as they are portraits of a man - they are also portraits of every man: what I depict of myself is common to all men; what I omit is that which differentiates me from them.
For those who already know my painting and for those who see it for the first time I'll try to explain or, better, to give my interpretation of the point I have reached.
An exhibition is, or at least should be, an occasion to clarify things. This comes from the need to justify the fact of putting together so many paintings that, like words of a speech, one wish they were coherent and made sense once together.
The figurative painting is a story and this happened in my paintings since the beginning by the symbolic representation of situations in which a character, a sort of my alter ego, anonymous, always like himself and multipliable, lived and still now lives.
In truth, I've always negated that I was the one but I had to give in to my sons' spontaneity who naturally identify him with me.
It's the assiduous association with the childish world and play that during the last years has slowly widened the spectrum of the representable in my paintings.
A feeling of emancipation and freedom (only apparent, since in painting, as usual, even the most evident sprezzatura only comes from hard work) leads me to more attention to what's real.
My representation world has doubled and each painting refers to the other, reflexes it in a labyrintic game of mirrors.
Thus I feel free to appear, to go in my paintings myself without renounce to my other me and let the paintings establish a game of speculation and reflexions from the fantastic world to the one of reality in a kind of daydream or maybe, a dream inside a dream.
The genres are mixed; still lives, animal toys, in the painting dimension transform themselves and almost enliven into portraits. And the real life, the atelier, the paintings themselves find their place in this set-up that becomes mise en abyme.
All put on a theatrical dimension and I find myself playing with images and sounds following a canvas that is often twist by the improvisation of the "actors" who, one after the other, appear on the scene. Here I am, a new Pierrot busy fighting against Pulcinella like Jacobs with the angel.
Looking for coherence, the point I've reached is more a chaotic continuation and an opening then a conclusion, a closing. And being things so complicated, mine is not really and explanation but more a bending*!
David Dalla Venezia
* The word piegazione translated with bending, doesn't exist in Italian and it has been invented by taking off the letter s from spiegazione.
Spiegazione, that in English means explanation, which etymology comes from the from Latin ex (s- that subtracts) and plicare (bend, fold), means in fact "take the folds off; make something flat" in the meaning of explaining, solve a complication.
The Italian title Piegazione (which wordplay in English could correspond to planation versus ex-planation) point out the fact that the author with his text is adding more folds instead of taking them off.