Road For the World

Overview

Occasionally, unexpectedly opening a window (the outline of a horse rendered in the background, or a square pane of plexiglas stuck to the canvas just to show the torturous swirls of silicone used to adhere it), Antonio Davide reveals his old interests for cartography and the desription of territory, but it is obvious that his - we might call it - entropic curve has led him in time to sublimate the original grotesque intention into a mixture of sign/memory that routs every residual temptation to view the world as something simple. No, the world is not simple: on the contrary, it is complex, and that is why Davide so often calls upon universal symbols of complexity such as near-balance, near-alphabet and near-symmetry - atrocious, because precisely they wipe out, and precisely entropically, the illusion of reversibility. All this, as we said, in works that are mostly places, landscapes and which the artist's hand seems to travel over rather than create -leaving behind, as shiny as a snail's slime, the doodles of intelligence. It is not a coincidence if "wandering" is a key-word of Antonio Davide's work, - an active word, to Quote Beckett again - just like "labyrinth", "dispersion", "argonaut", "flight", "discovery", "returning" and since words in his painting, have rights of citizenship, that is appear occasionally written, or rather painted. Also on the canvas (there is a well-known, historical discrimination between those painters who allow words to appear in their canvases and those who do not), it is important to surrender oneself to the backwash brought about by their sound and to pronounce them, think about them, while looking at the paintings, because the combination sign-memory - that is, that mechanism of eternal evocation that "elevates", according to Beckett, characters like Murphy and Antonio Davide - is only complete when the whiplash of form every once in a while, after all the grazing, wandering, dispersing and finding, becomes tongue and thus substance.