Due di febbraio

On two registers, which occupy the higher and lower sections of the composition, is a series of imprints that Scialoja has made on the canvas using oiled paper, drenched in paint and then “beaten” onto the surface of the previously coloured canvas. The result is a silent and proud work, at the same time anxious and almost sorrowful, governed by the dark tones of the background and the black imprints, aside from brief flashes of red which fall here and there like drops of blood.
“Ruffling” the surface and repeating a gesture was a method that Scialoja had observed in the work of the action painters in New York on his first visit overseas in 1956 and which he had instantly loved and sympathized with. This technique became fully rounded and fundamental to his purpose of representing the passage of time on the canvas, in the rhythmic series of events that time imposes on existence. This intention was later changed by the development of Scialoja’s thought, surely influenced in part by the emotions roused from his reading of the philosophy of Enzo Paci, moving from his initial idealism towards an existential and phenomenological interpretation of reality.