CRITICAL COMMENTARIES ABOUT AUSIELLO

THE COLOURS OF THE NATURE, THE NATURE OF THE COLOURS
 
In a previous Cycle of works, Gaetano Ausiello already showed that painting is for him a “modus vivendi, a way of life” and colour a noble “cipher” which points out the relationship between artist and nature and between nature and men.
He paid attention to the “transformations” of the observed elements in the terrible times of the destruction and fear (eruption, incandescent lava, unforeseeability of the way, destruction of buildings, flight of men and animals, waste of the cultivated fields), but also astonished at the conformation of the new landscape, at the new lymph of the earth which produced orchards and vineyards, at the persistence of the broom, flower of the desert.
The more shining and magmatic colours grew thinner and thinner and diminished their tone to signal in the change of the “shape” the shift from tragedy to drama and to nostalgia. This was not a passive nostalgia but a “algos nostou, a pain, a fear of the return”, a state of anthropological tension thanks to which the work opens to new ethnographical, geological and ecological interrelations under the sign of the collective imaginary. For this reason this new cycle of works, destined again to Florence and more in general to the community, prevalently based on “green” and blue, forms a group of “pictures” in which the nature of the colours opens to the hope and to the possibility of a return to nature.
 “Slowness” and persistence of oil painting say, as well, that for the artist (who believes it very much) the record of the events is also an alchemic fact.

Arcangelo Izzo



THE COLOURS OF THE LIFE

Painting as the building of the conscience, as space-chromatic emotion turned into the melting of wonder and nostalgia, into the visualization of a bright naturalness and modulated between lights now dense, now fresh and light, now excited by psychic impulses happily adequate to the mysterious and divine glory which breathes in the order, the beauty and the love: Gaetano Ausiello embraces the more vital expressiveness in his myths of charming, amazing landscapes-symbols, considered as inwardness privileged by the forthcoming sense of the event.
In the natural vastness, fertile of metamorphic processes, of rhythms codified into uniform and always new processes, which are foreseen, blossomed in secrecy, amplified in the epiphany’s revelation and which in the orchestration of the seasons 'rhythms keeps the leitmotiv of that silent sound which reveals the spirit that makes fertile each life, the painter becomes visitor and leader: his poetry teaches us not to forget the life.
The aesthetic inquiry, testified by a powerful language, rich in inner analogies, expressed in the dialectic spirit-nature, keeps tensions and breath of the expressionistic origins of the painting which Ausiello proposes to express imaginative plots, social themes, depersonalizations and wastes in the renunciation of the values, but a deeper conscience of the reality has made tormenting the desire to go beyond the sterility's and lack's state which refuses the men, no more human, the redemption of a ethical inspiration. The painter invites to love the unfathomable truth, to search in the life the miracle which pervaded the universe; he makes it with his visual tactility, with his informal lyricism, with that art's essence which Paolo Levi in the exposition at Maison Fleur in Courmayeur has well pointed out. A period of forty years of painting refines poetry and world's vision: Allegories of Ausiello's life, in the certainty of the naturalness, reconcile acceptance and dream, the reasons of the ancient man who doesn’t give up future.

Angelo Calabrese



THE TRUE GREEN

In the chromatic vibrations which don’t limit, and don’t highlight, either, privileged occasions, but combine, with a strong flavour of visionary abstraction, man and nature in the adventure who looks at each other in the same biological destiny, Gaetano Ausiello’s Informal has presentiments, perturbations, private life’s wounds and hints, in the flow of emotional levels at human presences, melted with the blooming green natural consistency and in that bloomed. A painting which is lyrically experienced in atmospheres and events, in the landscape’s perceptions in which take root and consist trees, flowers and leaves, and which holds humanity’s rhythms constantly in the balance between passions and presentiments.
The Informal only indeed renders, in the beats of that never in perimeters and outlines decipherable expressiveness, the suspension’s glamour and the sweetest or violent event, which in the undifferentiated humanity between spirit and nature reveals the deceits and gives knowledge. Ausiello’s green has planes’ “thicknesses” which in their transparent simultaneity stimulate the visual tactility to the search of deeper meanings. This is what the critics have caught in Courmayeur at Maison Fleur, where Paolo Levi has underlined the beauty of this lyrical informal search and in Florence, at Palazzo degli Affari, in the Review in which, at invitation, took place big contemporary artists. Ausiello suggests a giddiness’s, freedom’s and need’s poem, which are vital events, whose key is in the hands of the man of the third millennium.
The painting speaks about a miracle whose secret is in the reconciliation among the various seasons, times of the time, and the promise to give a meaning to the existence, always in balance among probabilities, inclement pain, a tissue of nothing, and where the freedom of the values’ miracle is ignored. There “true” green is the life and its secret is in the poetry which lets it perceive.

Angelo Calabrese



GAETANO AUSIELLO IN “CHROMATIC RHYTHMS” AND OTHER PICTORIAL EXPRESSIONS

In the first and in the second art’s volume “Italian art in the second half of the XX century” by Silipo and Ossani was made a list of the artists who set up a current called “Chromatic rhythm”.
Sidoli, Vescovi, Stromillo, Fedrizzi, Bertrand and other younger artists were mentioned, who were followers of this current. Ausiello’s name didn’t appear because, evidently, the authors didn’t know his works (and on the other hand how can a critic know the works of so many painters?) such as “Old walls”, a work which is here published and in which the painting comes off all in the colour, in a synthesis of the represented elements. Vision and not representation and –as Leonello Venturi wrote – it is not an abstract painting, but it is not realist painting, either. The realistic inspiration is accepted, but it is then expressed in the fundamental principle of modern art according to which the value of a painting consists in the form and even more in the colours.

L. Ossani



THE BEING’S ESSENCE

Let observe the being’s movements, from birth to the becoming, from the creation to the final deformation, where the form, originally inspiration of the author, changes in more vanishing features, full of emotionality and gestural expressiveness, with high content and inner potential. Gaetano Ausiello’s work origins with the becoming of the human being and develops through continuous spiritual moments which only belong to the artist and are felt as his own foundations from which he gets always and with the same lyrical force. Only his look at the world and at the reality near to him appears, a thematic dualism between verdant and vivid nature of the South and the History of his country, considered in the social and archaeological aspect. He wants to remember the life’s stages, the times’ evolution through the more conservative history and the structural primordial testimonies; he wants, I would say, to give his own sensory and symbolic stamp in the art without rules, but by following the inner sphere of the instinct.
It prevails the refusal of traditional culture, there is neither academicism nor realistic figures, but the work speaks strong, in a loud voice, it is not afraid of singing out of tune. By giving value to the matter – colour in his impasto – he blends it and makes it spirit, essence and human content. Ausiello’s art represents the moment in which the creative and suggestive possibilities of the imagination and of his own insights come true, by becoming mythical transfiguration of unrepeatable moments, with a sometimes exasperated and deforming stamp, by assuming a form of expression of being through delights, remembrances and a daily nature, which is associated with the idea of contingent and precarious.
The artist reaches the essential quality of the work, as it is felt as model subjective and spiritual experience. He has a remarkable level of imagination and feeling but also of ability by analysing and considering the social and real problems which surround us; he lives his time and his reality made of “Walls and Remembers”, of History and Archaeology, of landscapes with vivid colours, passionately represented and full of green with all the energy of a dense palette. It is a painting which wants to draw attention to itself , doesn’t live by evanescent reflections, but echoes light and colour, pure emotion. We assist at a rich production which grows up with Ausiello’s spirituality, by marking an unique and inimitable artistic career, especially for the chromatic gestural expressiveness. Vesuvius’ colour invades the work: red is especially present in the paintings which are inspired by the local archaeology, such as in “Finds”, Houses in Herculaneum”, in “Iside’s Temple” in Pompeii and in many others where the palette consists of bright shades. It is the being’s light which exists in the poetical nature and in the inborn force of artist’s expressivity, that is to say a light which will never set.
The form doesn’t follow the purpose but the colour, in accordance with a creative rhythm, and the graphic line is invisible. The aspect of the matter and, in this case, of the colour dominates and becomes perception’s object with which the artist can distinguish the work.

Isabella Convertino


AUSIELLO’S ART

(...) Ausiello is not only a landscape painter, even if he prefers this pictorial technique, but he is above all an authentic interpreter of other realities and he doesn’t despise neither the portrait nor the transposition on the painting of personal conceiving, that is to say of psychological social processes. So is one of his recent creations, in which he wanted to express, in a very effective composition, the condition of the present Italian society, that, en masse informed from the daily press with confusing and conditioning events, wrapped in a kind of frenetic collective fun, expresses the message of his own will of a generous redemption for a coveted economic and moral recovery.
These are the signs which testify, in a authentic artist, to his sensibility and his participation in the culture’s world.

Vincenzo Mistretta (La Voce della Provincia - 11 gennaio 1985)


They have written about him trhough the others:
Schettini, P. Girace, P. Perrone, M. Fioravante, M.M. Ferrari, N. Punzo, F. D'Armenio, A. Calabrese, L. Ossani, M. Occhipinti, A. Agrillo, A. Izzo, P. D'Amelie.
Newspapers and magazines that were interested in Gaetano Ausiello:
Bolaffi Arte, La Revue Moderne, Arterama, Il Resto del Carlino, La voce di Ferrara, 11 Mattino, Il Roma, Il Corriere di Napoli, Il Tirreno, Il Corriere della Sera, Nuova Civiltà, Arte, Nuovi Orizzonti, Il Lavoro, La Nuova Ribalta Artistica, Il Giornale d'Italia, Il Domani, La Voce della Provincia.

He was included in the following specialized publications: Dizionario dei Maestri d'Arte, gli Anni 60 dell'Arte Italiana, Pittori Italiani Contemporanei, Dizionario Biografico dei Meridionali, Pittori e Scultori Contemporanei, Eco della Critica, Arteguida, Mercato della Pittura Contemporanea, Un anno d'arte, Enciclopedia Mondiale degli Artisti Contemporanei.

Newspapers and magazines that were interested in Gaetano Ausiello:
Bolaffi Arte, La Revue Moderne - Parigi, Arterama, il Resto del Carlino, La Voce di Ferrara, Il Mattino, Il Roma, Il Corriere di Napoli, Il Tirreno, Il Corriere della Sera, Arte Mondatori, Nuova Civiltà, Nuovi Orizzonti, Il Lavoro, La Nuova Ribalta Artistica, Il Giornale d'Italia, Il Domani, La Voce della Provincia, La Nazione, La Repubblica, Quadri e sculture, Il Tempo.

He was included in the following specialized publications:
Dizionario dei maestri d'Arte, Gli anni '60 dell'Arte italiana, Pittori Italiani Contemporanei, Dizionario Biografico dei Meridionali, Pittori e Scultori Contemporanei, Eco della Critica, Arteguida, Mercato della Pittura Contemporanea, Un Anno d'Arte, Enciclopedia Mondiale degli Artisti Contemporanei, Pittori e Pittura Contemporanea, Dizionario Critico Artitalia, Dizionario dei Maestri D'Arte.