A man of science and poetry, Giancarlo Flati has worked for years to distill an evocative and essential iconography from the knowledge acquired through diagnostics. There is within the human body a secret and invisible island system of forms, colors, movements and sounds that reproduces the beauty of macrostructures in an inconceivably small dimension. Flowers of cells, webs woven out of organic filaments, colorful micro-sponges that breathe and eat, branches of tissue, and osseous crystals as light as white coral live in specialized regions whose purpose is to preserve life, an authentic Ultima Thule, the only territory on the planet that still conceals secrets. This biological primordium rests on an imperceptible balance designing a complex structure vibrant with slight motion. The sound generated is a primordial harmony, the breath of life that animates cosmic darkness. Flati's canvases trace the enlarged map developed through this exploration of the intimate, and the cognitive event becomes aesthetic.
(...) Fragments of shell coexist with the idea of the man of sand because they too hold the secret of the perfect code, the constant number that governs their spiral and their mathematically plotted interior, designed like the regular chains of DNA, interlocking strands that trace the web of life. It is therefore not random salvaged material that is lodged on the surface of Flati's canvases; no mute object inhabits the space organized like an authentic stage, where the essential furnishings of an ordered universe are set up. The perfect spheres of grains of sand, soil of creation, branches torn from the tree of the life, and shells with an engineered structure coexist with the powerful fragility of genetic design, a more capacious container of information than any hard disk. (...)
Flati is interested in the origin of beings and the origin of their mutations, just as he studies and operates on the mutations of cells and tissues. As a man of science, he is guided by the tenacity and security of knowledge, but gives free rein to his sensitivity as a poet and artist when addressing the impenetrable boundary. Only thus can the gleam of light shining through a tear in the invisible curtain be perceived. It is creative intuition alone that feels the breath of life of a magnitude that is immeasurable but present in the recesses of all respiration. The fragments of perception settle on the canvas like imperceptible breath, the shadows of primordial time: a code, a sound, a grain of sand. There is thus no contrived overlapping in the avowed harmony that exists between Flati's work and the poetry of Mario Luzi, a convergence emerging on completion of the canvases. Like Luzi, "they draw him / into their religious womb / recesses and labyrinths, / maelstroms of dense darkness, / toward the minute roots, / as far as / the still mute word / mute but full-blown, / already with the strength of its imminence."
What Luzi and Flati share is the yearning for the infinite that blazed in the mind of the pagan Hypatia, the librarian of Alexandria hacked to pieces for her subversive wisdom, the prefiguration of a heroine of the new creed, namely Saint Catherine, again of Alexandria. Always at loggerheads with the philosophers, she succeeded in transcending the boundaries of knowledge only by abandoning herself to visions and her mystical wedding. Flati bears in his name the breath of life and it is almost with religious abandonment that he opens up to the creative perception that affords a glimpse of the first breath, the unknown "number" that orders chaos, the primordial vibration. As Luzi's Hypatia recognizes, we know of "no surgery of the heart / that can lay it bare and decipher its meaning - I tell myself: / grace, perhaps... ".
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Giogia Mori / 2006
GIANCARLO FLATI, PAINTER OF THE BREATH OF TELEMATIC SPIRITS - Rome, March 15th 2006