When in the void of color, I found everything

If the road to pure color began in the Middle Ages, Arnaldo Ricciardi gives his personal contribution to this journey by renouncing line and form in the name of absolute contemplation.

The line tangles the eye and tears it away from the color. A sign tentacle that diverts attention from the chromatic sea, attracting to itself all the value that the observer pours into the painting. It is an embryonic principle of the world that fits into the ideal dimension of pure color fabric. The stroke is irreversibly proposed as a catalysing and preparatory element for the construction of a figure. For this artist had to abandon him to immerse himself in his art. Although the artist has never distinguished himself for his defined stroke, the total renunciation of the sign was preparatory for the transition to an abstract code that exalted the values dearest to him. Let's think, for example, of the chromatic fascination.

Colours play a role on the human psyche that we are not always aware of. Immersing ourselves in a particular tonality act on our emotional tone in a particular way, conveying precise sentimental values. Suffused, especially at the borders, the color is distributed on the canvas like a pulsating plain and sinks endlessly towards the depths of the spirit. There is no line that ripples the magmatic surface of Arnaldo's color drafts, silent in form but evocative in their ineffable substance. Yet sometimes it seems to see, better if you come across the work without warning, an unspecified glimmer of a figure: perhaps a door, some windows, a gate. Splendid chromatic thresholds able to make an uninterrupted passage from inside to outside: first the eye goes out of itself to immerse itself in the chromatic expanse; immediately afterwards, what he doesn't know is that, once inside that non-reality, he is immediately destined to return to the spirit that prompted him to escape.

These sensible though inexperienced atmospheres are doors to a knowledge, perhaps self-knowledge, never traced before. In that breath of paint hides the mystery of what is distant, remote, lost in the dimension of what cannot be understood. But in the space of the picture, it seems that a truth comes close to us by dropping the veil of shadow that envelops our eyes and spirit. We are at the beginning of a catharsis where color speaks volumes for a condition devoid of rules and systems, where nothing envelops us and introduces us to everything. After all, the artist's task is not to fill the void, but to create it.

And Arnaldo Ricciardi finds emptiness in the profound flatness of an infinite colour. We don't know how much the artist looked at medieval painting and at the origins of Western art history, but there is no doubt that the connection with the history of mosaicism is present. The idea of a pure color style finds its roots in the Byzantine area, where nothing more than a variegated expanse of color was needed to express the world. The forms were outlined by the superimposition of different chromatic fragments, which by interlacing created the visual differences useful for distinguishing the profiles. However, there was no line to pollute the symphony of colours, the only protagonists of a perspective considered perhaps rudimentary, but certainly evocative.