Alberto Carlos Ayala (XX) - Vulture

VULTURE
Technique and support: Acrylic, plaster and salt on 100% cotton canvas, fine grain, high quality, Made in Italy
Dimensions: 80 × 80 cm
The work draws inspiration from Vulture, the ancient volcanic complex of Basilicata, whose geological presence continues to shape the landscape through mineral stratifications, reliefs, lake basins and natural mineral water springs. Its activity belongs to a remote time, and yet Vulture preserves a latent force, a deep memory inscribed in the shape of the territory and in the living quality of its underground resources.
The painting surface is configured as a broad field of turquoise and blue, traversed by blue accumulations and dispersed dark marks, like suspended mineral fragments. The blue recalls the hydric dimension of the territory: deep aquifers, underground circulation, the passage through volcanic rocks and mineral strata. The painting builds an atmospheric and liquid space, in which air and geological matter coexist in a state of unstable balance.
The red horizontal band, crossed by yellow vibrations and made in relief with plaster and salt, acts as a geological threshold and the gravitational axis of the composition. Its material and three-dimensional presence introduces a luminous fracture within the cold field, condensing heat, depth and magmatic memory. The plaster gives body to the line, while the salt evokes the mineral component, crystallization, the physical trace of a natural process that links fluid and rock, surface and depth.
The contrast between the blue expanse and the red band generates the fundamental tension of the work: the rarefied, contemplative dimension relates to the memory of fire, pressure and transformation. In this balance between cooling and combustion, between flow and sedimentation, Vulture becomes a perceptual and symbolic matrix.
The work presents the meeting between the volcanic system and underground circulation as a phenomenon of continuous transformation. The bubbles, effervescence and internal vibrations of the mineral waters surface on the surface through accumulations, stains, transparencies and small dispersed marks. What today is still drunk as the territory’s daily resource becomes the image of a persistent geological force, capable of transforming the depth of the earth into nourishment, presence and shared memory.
Color operates as matter-time: the blue glazes build a wide, suspended visual duration, while the blue accumulations and dark marks introduce a deeper sedimentation. The red band concentrates the event, the trace, the threshold. The work develops as a field of crossing, inviting the viewer to move slowly between expansion and concentration, between transparency and density.
The work is part of a research dedicated to the great volcanic systems conceived as archives of geological time and as generative structures of the landscape. In Vulture, the painting condenses the energy of the volcano, the duration of its transformations and the earth’s matter’s capacity to produce conditions of fertility, inhabitation and life. The volcanic landscape emerges as a complex organism, where fluid and incandescent elements, depth and surface, matter and memory participate in a single generative process.
The painterly language dialogues with tonal painting and with instances of material abstraction through a controlled handling of the surface and a construction built through progressive stratifications. The gesture remains free and measured: every trace contributes to the definition of a unitary visual field, in which the painting matter becomes a place of contemplation and guardianship.
The work is signed on the back and will be accompanied by an authenticity certificate.
For color balance, material density and coherence within a geologically and symbolically articulated research, Vulture naturally situates itself in a collecting context attentive to contemporary abstraction, the memory of the landscape and the transformation of natural matter into visual experience.