Thought #90, 2008

Enido Michelini  

The impression that remains, when we observe the current pictorial work of Enido Michelini, is that we are facing a colorist. Not an ordinary colorist, but a painter who managed to harmonize the graphic side of his previous professional life with the structure of current color. This is not little, the difficulty of designing a line and a color used as a single element comes from the dichotomy between the linear of the drawing and the pictorial - always associated with the abundant use of color, not contained by the drawing – as established by Heinrich Wolfflin in the Principles of Art History (1915).

This dichotomy pitted Venetian and Florentine painters (Titian and Botticelli, for example) against each other, as representatives of these polarities at the end of the 15th century. In the same way, the controversy between disciples of Poussin and Rubens on the same question in the 17th century and the break between classical and romantic painters synthesized by Ingres and Delacroix led us to associate color with mobility, density, three-dimensionality, opticity and tactile qualities .

Emotionally, color is associated with passion, mystery, romance, sensation, while line has been relegated to the arena where reason, control, logic, precision and refinement merge their forces. Enido Michelini thus achieved a rare feat by harmonizing his refined and logical rational graphics with mysterious, passionate and sensitive color, and thus created his language at the same time expressive and ordered, in addition to reconciling the two elements of language: expression and the system of elements, signs and concepts, that is to say pictorial grammar.

A painting is expressive when it breaks its grammar, like those of Van Gogh, as well as those of Mondrian, who chose the closed system, in which the order is radical, leaving no room for expression.

Enido Michelini achieved an unusual feat, bringing together the graphic and the pictorial in the same poem of light and color. Its color is not contained by the line, but it is the line which has become color, giving greater expression to its sensitive, sensorial and sensual poetics.