Text by Luca Pietro Nicoletti (italian translation by Katie Zaeh)
Text on catalogue, Un incontro fortunato, 20/03/2013 - 12/04/2013, Solo exhibition at Galleria Ostrakon, Milan
If you concentrate your gaze on an object in full light and then close your eyes, for an instant, outlines of irritated contours remain imprinted on your retinas, like an immediate reduction of what you have just seen to line. During this instant, before itescapes from his memtter - as unexpected blunders. Behind this first impression, however, is disguised a much more articulated work of structure, composite construction, and material from expressive language, in which shadow dominates. In this reduction to line, that stems from drawing, arrives at etching (in which he records the best results of his work) and branches even out to the applied arts; Alberto constructs a vision that imparts a gradual deciphering of the image: only an attentive observation allows for a reconstruction of those spatial coordinates and elements of the visual story, with the desired fringes of evocative ambiguity. It would be nice, in the future, to disassemble his works into their singular visual sources, and into the logic that is made in the assembly of the image. Without the author’s iconography of the cinema, as a reference for manipulation and transformation (but not betrayal) there would not be, beyond the icons, the linguisticmodality of the elaboration of a “story” that, like his, comes from still images. One must remember, however, that behind an impression of immediacy in the images there is disguised long and patient work. The blacks of his drawings and of his prints are not deaf, uniform applications of tone but slow additions of strokes. Alberto reaches the deepness of the shadows layer by layer, by slow juxtapositions of pencil marks and slow etchings of Etching and Aquatint. It is an ancient craft, thatfor Alberto no longer has secrets, that he brings forward to new possibilities of language and of storytelling.