Alfredo Pasolino

The concrete form of every ideal beauty

Davide Cristofaro’s is the well-made face of a punctiliousness that never betrays the ideal Beauty of the dreams of other times, immortal archetypes of the soul. Of keen and cultivated intellect, of courteous manners, the two interacting in the development of his character and his temperament. Drawing, Art and Fashion. Specialised as a theatrical costume designer, a designer of painting on silk. His figure stands out among the international Masters of the New Millennium, within a Pre-Raphaelite art mannered towards a moderate modern synthetism. He has a personality as prominent as it is unusual for a fashion designer, an emulsive creativity surfacing from an original, visionary dream of the soul, which have allowed him to refine his aesthetic sensibility in everything that concerns Art. In his portraits, marked by precise contours, he yields to the seductions of the anecdote, to seize the secret of light and of beauty. In a search for elegant expression in the portrait composition, in formal taste, in the profile, as much as in expressions of vivid plastic force. His characters are “Gods of other times” who convey the inner dialogue, a reflection of the soul. In love, beyond the senses, with fusing Art and Fashion in his fabrics, as true works of art.

Nobility of the inner life sublimated into streams of the creative soul

A great interpreter of visionary realism, along a line of soundings into the creative soul, between proto-Romantic realism and ethical and moral dramatisation, he presents us with an unprecedented performance of pictorial compositions dense with great intuitive and existential suggestions.

A planned cycle of imaginative works of his dramatic message, that is, of his realism of a thousand sensational throbs of life expressed in his nobility of spirit. Signifying a long-awaited return to the golden age and to the ancient traditions, underpinned by the centrality of the human person, as a Leopardian symbol of the wait for a season in bloom, on his enamoured poetic palette. Thanks to his spiritual Symbolism, a symptomatic, revelatory embrace between the thought-ideal and the heart of the painted word. An anguished denunciation of the continual wounds inflicted by an individualistic and material civilisation, turned only towards the absolute evil of madness, towards the global, hyper-technological, individual self-centredness of the centripetal ego, which only a cataclysm could stop. That is, in its movement of exponential acceleration towards self-destruction. We stand at the edge of the abyss, at risk of a point of no return.

Bravo, Davide: you have been able to give symbolic force, and expressive charge and intensity, to the idea behind the project, leading us readers to your noble ethical and moral message, of great realistic elevation, with the broad breath of meditation and reflective listening. With the colours of resignation, in the surrender to the refuge of the inner life, realm of the soul! Love, the heartbeat of nascent life, as a metaphor of the radiant dawn, when the awaited mind and heart are wed in a synergic sin unum. Here the soul reveals itself as a fusion of identity with that same Love which moves the sun and the stars, between lover and beloved, both fused into the same intrinsic real subject. The same Love in glorifying the Lord, Great Director of Life. Which, by the most sensitive induction of every one of Davide’s works, makes us fall in love with beauty-joy in the same delirium of love as King David of Israel, dancing, girding himself with precious bracelets and anklets, to glorify the divine Manifestation. Impetuous torrent of the One-Life unfolding like the radiant rays of the Sun…

Amore incondizionato

“As far as the inner eye can reach, there is no horizon without hope.”

A tale veiled by a discreet, intimist symbol, that of the Painter Davide Cristofaro, in this oil painting, beginning from the formative foetal age towards the sea of existing, upon the theatricalisation of the objectifying human drama… Davide chooses the placental water, primordial symbol of the life that emerges from the sea, to fill the senses of the soul. And he offers us a metaphysical, dreamlike vision, a poetic externalisation of his visionary sounding, like an allegorical section of his adventurous journey into the dimensional scanning of an emulsion rising to the surface, of a prodigious, realistic manifestation of the soul, and of its reactive symbolism, a vital expression of spirituality. One senses an atmosphere of the sacred, in which the flowering of the one Life, in its infinite buddings, runs strong. The life hidden in the microcosm of a seed, all the way to the human embryo, so that the sensory eye may at once perceive the impact of those elements which on the canvas seem random, yet which return, reveal themselves, pursue one another in their recurrence. From this they take on a meaning that, naturally, is sublimated into a great expectation: a Leopardian happiness, the expectation of a future good. Thus the reference to the metaphysics of the inventive dream, the authentic calibre of the true great artist, takes on the full expression of the dreamlike narrative, studded with a poetic pleiad of symbolism of spiritual origin. Cristofaro clothes his intuitive perception and gives it a new, unprecedented garb of mental images, granting them a woven history, a culture which, at the height of a colourist half-light that envelops the observer in the sweetest psycho-emotionality, enriches the picture and releases, through the imaginary of continuity, the identity of intuition, which enriches its reason, in the unstoppable magical adventure that belongs only to the man who still knows how to dream.

Dreamlike compositions and all the seasons of the soul to turn dream into life: a connective tissue suffused with poetry, in which the finite gives meaning to the infinite

Having overturned the academic Course of Painting, having attained the spiritual in Art, Davide Cristofaro manages to halt every flood of the visionary dream with the primary energy of intuition, and to stop time with the immortality of his own inner, subjective wonder at images held in a state of abstractist suspension, bringing out the chromatic magic of a Neo-Expressionism induced in the viewer, a meditative tantra of intimist joy. Davide supplants the old graphic alphabet with unique signs, graceful lightness and divine light.

For Cristofaro, drawing gives Being… The sign exists solely to make the creative idea visible, entrusting his own perceptions or imaginings to the value of the sign, not as psychic vibration, but as the sign’s aptitude for the gaze, for induced communication, for communicativeness, for his vocative predilection for the models of the past, virtually transfigured, as alchemy, in their dynamic plasticity, as pure poetics of suggestions of the soul. Davide connects to visionary realism, in his peculiar ideational condition, the wellspring of the whole, drawing archetypes from within a memory of time, with the charm of the Macchiaioli psychosynthesis of sign/colour/tonal range/shadow/half-light. Not only as an interpretation of the setting but in that articulation of the apparent abstract objectification of the symbol, in the reality to be represented, as an element of enthusiasm for an apparent nostalgia of the joy of living all the reflections of the universe.

With the effort of reproducing the double of the real, in the expressive exercise the soul reflected and folded back upon the alphabet-language of the subconscious, by analogy with music, in the pure rhythmic decorative simplicity, as a refined allegorical play of art, along the line of the subjects represented, for the Apulian artist drawing is an instrument of analogical representation. One of his preparatory sketches is already a simulacrum close to the real object. By analogy with music, a preparatory drawing is already art! As in music, Davide does not rehearse. To the instrument the harmony of the whole, yet, introducing it into the tonal sounding, he gives every possible character by analogy with musical notes… He overturns the processes of composition. A subversion in the modes of narrative action, like the draft of a novel or a poem. Thus the preparatory drawing is already, in some way, the very nature of the message. That is, of the final product. For Davide, one thinks and believes, each of his works, the object of artistic interest, is never an end in itself. It has validity and takes shape as the immediate expression of the creative spirit only when thought and heart are wed. Even when, for each of his portraits, works, abstract, caricatural, humorous, histrionic, satirical, he sees them as precious, engaging, mirror reflections of different feelings, that is, of the actions of the artist who, with the language of an ancient sculptor, in delighting the psycho-emotionally induced spirit of the observer who, in the eyes of amorphous, unexpressed ignorance, wishes to grasp subtle relationships between the artist’s vast culture of the soul and his time, on the complex mental paths that underlie his graphic expression, beyond colours that seek only spontaneity or gesture, visionary realism makes visible things that ought to be and that will be, destined for realisation. With the need to tell oneself a dream, an identity. A culture that is enriched by this picture of his and releases, through continuation, the identity of intuition. In the unstoppable magical evolution that belongs only to the man who still loves to dream.

Dear Davide

Dear Davide, my most special friend, only when, as one observes in your splendid painting Bellezza – Verità, there is true Creativity, invention and an unprecedented way of expressing it. As the visionary dream of a lucid, open-eyed mediumship, this is the truest artist, an unprecedented inventor, as the great Miró was. Davide does not follow a channel already traced by the recordings of memory: he is a poet of the palette. Every day he writes on a page of the purest white and sets down there the sensations of his soul, the unconscious suggestions, the strong emotional impact that is the great driving force of his work of art.

With a critic’s affection, and in friendship.