Oscar Fonti
For Oscar
I have seen several of your forms emerge from nowhere in the backgrounds of your paintings and then be swallowed up by them again. I have also sometimes thought that many artists, even with no contacts at all, are perhaps something similar, urged into appearance by their emotions and subtleties. Years ago I wrote a composition called "Memorie" ("Memories") for pianoforte and lights in which sound objects, delicate fragments of history, emerge from a formless acoustic background and are then swallowed up by it again. This was nostalgia and bashfulness, but I myself didn't understand it. Nostalgia and bashfulness as in your Art. Y our raunded, mother-like forms, your ovary-shaped skulls, your figure fragments that are no longer figures and perhaps never were ali these things are nostalgia. Not, however, the ordinary nostalgia of someone who has nothing to regret, but rather, the exquisite nostalgia of a man who feels himself at a distance from a principle - a principle, a template which you express in your soft, motherly, circular signs. It is indeed strange how indebted I am to you, dear Oscar, for making me understand better the emotions underlying one of my own works.
Sergio Rendine
Characters and Performers