Alida Maria Sessa / 2006

(...) Flati experiences a firm and lasting physical connection not only with mineral matter but also with the invisible matter of light, described in the title of one of his works as the seed of everything. He thus reveals in actual fact the umbilical relationship with the world through earth, barely cooled lava, meteorites shattered on falling or fragments of the civilization of consumption, because everything is absolutely necessary or must be feigned such in order to avoid leaving tears and gaps in the systematic mosaic. (...)
The artist is thus perfectly able to avoid being overwhelmed by Arte Povera and American Neo-Geo. The particular linguistic, mythical-symbolic, ritual signs that recur in his works as in a subliminal subtext stress this relationship and reveal the need to seek out his identity and human specificity, his emotional DNA, precisely by scrutinizing the remote and invisible fragments of inorganic chemistry.
A work by Flati is to be read more as a structure of communication and exchange than as an on-site investigation and to be identified above all for its sacral characterization and atemporal suspension. It involves examining nature and its evolution also through the mysterious sequences of the invisible, as a natural phenomenon, also in its intrinsic poverty and repetitivity, not to say predictability, so as to withdraw from the great but perhaps excessively contingent themes that dominate us. It involves using the rhetoric of symbolic value, sacral meaning, and existential necessity, archetypal and symbolic, to counter the rhetoric of the great collective processes, globalization, the crisis of resources, and pollution as well as technological obsolescence. And yet he takes little interest in unspoiled nature because he identifies with it very little. He is wholly indifferent to the geological singularity, to the lump of earth that has come down to us miraculously intact, and indeed practically always ventures on a repertoire of highly contaminated things to be singled out, represented, and revalued.
Figuration and Art Informel are no longer separate watertight compartments; Giancarlo Flati's subject matter is primarily anthropological substance rather than the sedimentation of crumbled rock. It is a search for intrinsic meaning that certainly attaches great importance to the teachings of Burri and especially Antoni Tapies when flying low over lumps of earthy matter to mold the totemic Great Mothers of the most recent works. It has, however, a doggedness all of its own, an instinctual, libidinal side that will become clearer to you in time.
There is a religious connotation in this effort to give meaning to territorial order, to the chance that imposes order on natural chaos, and indeed to the chance that creates and recreates with infinite variations. Flati seeks roots that are far more archaic than Christianity. On the one hand, he is firmly lodged in Presocratic philosophy. On the other, he experiences the expressive potential of decay.
Prepare yourselves for a long march.