Camillo Gannelli - Orizzonti notturni

A night diptych. A boundary.

It is not a landscape to contemplate, but a landscape to cross.

Matter as language
The work plays entirely on tactility. It is not painting that wants to be photographic; it is painting that wants to be geological.

In the upper part, a dense black, almost bituminous, worked with a spatula, brushed, absorbing every light. It is a starless night, a material night that weighs.
Then, suddenly, the rupture: a thin, vertical, filamentous line. A forest of birches reduced to pure sign, a white-silver scratch on a dark background. They are not trees, they are traces, veins, ice rain falling in reverse, from bottom to top.

Below, the ground. Two chromatic registers that the diptych makes even more powerful in its duplication: a band of violet-magenta, unnatural, almost toxic, like an alchemical twilight, that fades into a crackled, cracked, arid gray. It is earth, it is ash, it is salt.

The diptych as device
The choice of the diptych is not decorative, it is conceptual. The black seam between the two panels is part of the work.

It interrupts the forest, breaks its continuity and forces the eye to sew it back together. It creates a rhythm, a breath. One and two, identical yet never the same. Like two frames of the same dream, or two plates of an X-ray of winter. The tall vertical format enhances the sense of threshold: they are two doors opening onto infinity.

There is a learned, inevitable reference to the tradition of Italian Informalism and to the Nordic—Burri for burnt matter, Friedrich for the sublime of night—but stripped of any rhetoric. Here everything is reduced to the essential.

Ultimately, it is a work of great, dark elegance. It does not adorn a wall; it hollows it out. It is not a landscape to look at while you pass by, it is a place to stay still, for a few seconds, in the cold.

Each acrylic painting on panel measures 30x60x5 cm