Impronte di paesaggio

Low down, a long strip of light crosses the entire painting. Below it, a narrow spit of land forms a far-distant horizon. At the centre, this duller-coloured land rises very slightly, as if stretching towards the light. This short-lived cresting is the sole movement in the entire canvas, the only element that takes it out of an immobile silence. The upper two thirds of the space are dominated by an icy sky, dull-coloured and streaked with clouds, not a breath of wind to disturb it. A landscape? Perhaps, but definitely not only this.
This painting embodies the very soul, overflowing with invincible melancholy, of Silvio Lacasella.
In it, the artist achieves an extraordinary rarefaction of the gestures necessary to painting: he has done so not by spelling them out, naming them one by one (light, line, colour …) under the rational impulse marking the path taken by analytical painting, but starting from the technique of etching, which he had practiced so long and so masterfully; and which had induced in him a parsimony in the use of the sign, making it resonate to its own diapason. Yet in this harsh, thin painting there beats, subterranean, a powerful, empathetic emotion, hidden from the eye like embers beneath the ashes.