“La couleur est mon obsession, ma joie et ma torture toute la journée”
Vidà is the acronym of an artist who does not want to say his name, but who is willing to give his all. His work is extremely heterogeneous and tells us about the thousand transformations of art: from immobile and inanimate substance, color comes to life changing into strength, form, substance and meaning.
The artist takes up a difficult path. His constant flux between abstraction and informality makes hard to place his work in the contemporary art world.
Vidà tears up the rules of classicism, expressionism and transavanguardia, in the attempt to establish different ones.
His is a painting against painting: bright colors, hues acid counterpoint leaning on a hidden design, marked out by a strong compositional awareness.
Lieing deep in this kind of liquid light makes us different and suspended beings. The passing of time does not destroy, but changes.
Before meeting Vidà I had never come into a color, into its secrets, into the alchemies that generate it, into the chemistry that makes it aware and makes it shine.
Looking at his paintings I found myself feeling the color in a new way, actually the color itself came strai- ght to my face, strong but fluid, with good power.
I felt that strange and unique ancestral vibration of crossing glances with a wild animal, of meeting a centuries-old tree, of smelling the scent of the incoming rain. His paintings for me are beginnings, incipits of wonderful stories that immediately take you by the hand and lead you to magical and hidden places.
I walk inside his works, like the traveler, like the pilgrim, like those who search without knowing what just for the pleasure of finding emotions.
Colors are electromagnetic radiation reflected from surfa- ces hit by light that through the eyes, involve the nervous system and are converted by the brain into real and concrete sensations. The history of the colors’ sources is lost in the mists of time. Those based on mineral substances have been used since prehistoric times: chalk, ochre, in various shades from light red to light yellow. Cave paintings of the Upper Paleolithic show black colors obtained from manganese dioxide or charcoal, more rarely green earths and brown manganese oxide and exceptionally manganese violet as well.
Starting from the Neolithic, the range of minerals used for painting and ceramics expands, and various vegetable or animal-based stains are created for dyeing fabrics, such as madder red, indigo blue, woad blue, mignonette yellow.
The Egyptians were the first to devote an effort to the pain- ting colors preparation. The “Egyptian frit” or “Egyptian blue”, obtained by baking a precise mixture of lime, copper oxide and quartz in a kiln at 800-900 degrees, and subsequent grinding, starting from minerals such as limestone, malachite and sand, is the oldest synthetic pigment. Another synthe- tic pigment is lead antimoniate, known since the sevente- enth century as “Naples yellow”, produced as lead oxide or carbonate and antimony oxide, resulted by inerals transfor- mation. Some pigments created about 4000-5000 years ago have been fundamental colors until 1700-1800. Among these, white lead was a fundamental pigment in painting until the end of the 19th century.
The pigments used in the Middle Ages were inherited from antiquity. Minium and cinnabar are the two basic colors of the early Middle Ages (just think of miniatures), together with gold leaf, obtained simply by coins striking. In the same period a new pigment appears, ultramarine blue, produced from lapis lazuli blue, imported from far away Afghanistan, which is added to the azurite that was used before; the fusion of these pigments allows the production of different shades according to the grinding degrees.
Medieval painters made extensive use of organic substan- ces: indigo blue and woad blue dyes to which they added litmus crimson lake and red lake.
Read more
