Duccio Trombadori / 2006

The human eye sometimes cannot believe what it sees. This happens above all when the truth manifests itself with the sublime obviousness of what is objective and yet apparently unverifiable. The fact is that the deeper layers of being are not normally open to view. If they are to be seen, it is necessary to move beyond the deceptive states of perception and open up the perspective to new visual fields and new forms of knowledge. It is to this philosophical and almost superhuman expressive intent that Giancarlo Flati's penetrating work seeks to respond. He endeavors to communicate the inexpressible through the elaborate and invaluable reciprocal interference of art and scientific knowledge. Flashes, luminous streaks, amoeboid corpuscles, and reflections of strange movements in space stimulate the perception of an infinitesimal detail that eludes the control of the immediate gaze, like the highly defined synthesis of a chaos that is only apparent. And the spectacular character of the microscopic survey staged by Flati becomes all the more surprising as he lays down unfamiliar painted images separating the primordial flow of life from the flux of its uncontrollable variations.
(...) The congeries of original elements (cells, atoms, neurons) thus presents itself as the profile of a biogenetic landscape that is not subject to the ordinary laws of gravity because it is situated beyond space and time in an original and germinal dimension. What the eye normally does not see (the infinitely small) is instead foreseen by the intellect. And "conceiving" practically takes the place of "seeing", prompting the blossoming of images pregnant with biological correspondences between forms and colors, effervescences of light and energy.
It is no coincidence that Flati seeks to represent the "sequences of the invisible" aesthetically, pinning down a kaleidoscope of elusive situations in which the life cycle is expressed in its distinct polarities. (..) Almost taking flight from the more elementary senses, Flati trusts to the chronometry of the mind to deduce what is only apparently a theory of abstract figuration. In actual fact, he gauges the possibility of approaching the representation of the "primary causes" or the astounding genetic effects that are at the root of every natural event. In no other way could we perceive the application of pictorial matter rising over two dimensions with spatial depths and swirls through flows of color superimposed in accordance with a planned and self-aware gesturality to the point of representing the "children of neurons" as though they were "angels", agents bearing information about the intimate secret of life. (...) And this "epiphany of the invisible" leads the observer by the hand through an experience that, though visual, is transformed primarily into an intellectual adventure. Informing means "giving form", and the true purpose of a painting is always to make the configuration of a "structure" manifest to the eye. In describing the cosmic force in its molecular granularity, in the interweaving of incandescent matter and cellular constellations, Flati tells an eternal and hence primordial tale that fascinates and attracts by virtue of the astonishing visual mimicry from which it originates. Intuition and representation become one with the visual thought of the painter, who has no intention of restricting his expressivity to pure aesthetic virtuosity. Here the passionate drive for knowledge trusts to the sensory virtues of pictorial language in order to open up new possibilities of investigation in a play of artifice that strives to compete with the incommensurable secret of existence. The result is a finely modulated kaleidoscope of forms producing a visual drama that cannot be exhausted in the space of a single painting. Committed with all his being to the task of bringing art into line with the miraculous laws of nature (from the structural theme of crystals to the solar system and the order-boundary of elementary particles), Giancarlo Flati tests and hones his style in a figurative tension conceived as "open-ended work". Just like the ordered complexity of the cosmos ("God makes as many things as He can"), the requirement of plenitude of artistic intention inclines in this case toward the psychophysical economy of an imitatio Dei capable of describing the world as it is without blocking its exuberant generative flow at the same time. In this maelstrom of sometimes dazzling figurations, Giancarlo Flati thus triggers a current of intense aesthetic empathy with the "dark sources" that house the "world spirit" and taps the fountainhead of an extraordinarily original and variously modulated imagination.