There is a time, just after the mid-sixties, when the painting of Barbaro silent, and seems to lie within the size of a hand, perhaps freer. Who knows, a sign of love, of freedom, of anxiety for a moment subsided. I mean the landscape, the nature, of how to change your impression of the canvas, as it were, for the first time, looking for spa parties, and the color does not cover but to relax. Barbaro had begun near Gino Rossi, between 1947 and 1948 (but this is not an essay on the whole work, only an attempt to understand, first of all to myself, as changes in his description of the nature , and because it implements, have reached a certain point, this deviation so obvious) . They are small paintings worshipful, almost freebies, showcases blessed in which content is the proper object of devotion. With the effect of a light datura, color enamel, the beautiful ceramics of northern France. And the sense of casting a perennial, an invisible river that floods and no obstacles. The lagoon water first, then the sea of Brittany. The horizon is pressed on, or is all blooming in the Venetian Cune appearances between 1949 and 1951. It is a new form of painting, segments and filaments, which cuts the corners of gardens or the Excelsior Torcello or the limits of a small harbor protected.Appears far more established tradition of Venetian art, and even the neo-landscape painting that had taken root, based in Burano, already in the decades between the wars, and that at the same time churning out other tests often tired and almost never true . A variation instead French animated the work of Bar cheater, that longer stays beyond the Alps, from 1953, nourish a definitive and compelling.
This will result in paintings which is constantly increasing desire to tell, not to let the silence fall and wrap the space created. Paris and its neighborhoods, the Seine, Douarnenez, Brittany: everything vibrates in separate scan of the houses, the waters, the deserted streets under the gray sky of autumn. The colors are added together, and the joy of spring in Laguna, only after a while, it becomes ashes mixed with the rain, the fog in the suburbs with the smoke from the chimneys. The painting of ro Beard faces this tone cloistered, contemplative, drowned in the mists of the North. Matter ripples, like a wave that breaks in Brittany, dark, windy days of November. Only occasionally, when Barbaro took up painting in Venice, the color returns to kindle it, but just barely, because he spends over him, and inside, the seasonal lights it shorter.
Already at the beginning of the next decade that something happens again in this work. It could be said as the journey of Matisse, Van Gogh, or before, or the crossing of Gauguin, or visit Klee, Macke. Or Cézanne, Bonnard after, then de Staël. An orange tree, a country red in the land of Spain under a sky still. Break the horizon, broken levees also of blue. The 1962 is a long journey just in Spain, in 1964 and 1965, the first visits in North Africa. In January of 1967 left for Morocco, where he remained until the end of the summer. Now, with persistence and love, tenderness and passion, beginning with Saverio Barbaro African time.
I would not be able to say, and it is not my job, the impact of the painter with the Muslim community. I mean with the habits and customs of different people. Instead, membership happy, upsetting the immense expansion of space, its dispersion, its only be fabric color, pure color. Get started now, Barbaro, in the 1967, show how in painting everything has changed. The courage to paint, without mediation, with the chance of poetry. Suddenly, announced by nothing but by his own geographical shift, he plunges in color to disappear, giving rise to certain inlays matissiane stun their synaesthetic effect. Color that smells, shaken by the evening light of a sunset endless reverberating.
Barbaro advances, no longer afraid. Obvious kinship between his king and they those new places. The horizon does not exist, the sky is the eye of the beholder all the wide earth and sand, the dunes, the row of methyl pal. The picture is a kaleidoscope, magnifying glass, with a magnificent view. Maybe Barbaro has never painted pictures so beautiful, and true and intense, like those that marked his early years in Africa. For Sen. know of a discovery, a fascination of a spell. To be sure that a mirage, really, could seize the wayfarer, and that mirage become the darling of painting.
Maybe that's why the landscapes in the late sixties and the beginning of the seventies, they quickly naturalistic description of their appearance, and are, instead, the most anti-naturalistic conceivable. Are no longer description, no longer result only see but the vision and dream together, and the rule of desire. Pink sands, azure streets, palm trees yellow color of the sun. Barbaro draws those vertices of abstraction with color that had been characteristic of a fresco cycles of Giotto. A big picture of 1976 is in this sense the highest example. A tree all white and pink flower is planted, and miraculously suspended in balance, on a road that is not blue water, it is the river is no longer the Atlantic Ocean in Britain. You do not know what is the magic of life, the simplicity and delicacy of the time, awareness and smemorarsi. It is the night before the announcements, a fire in a village of poor shepherds. The Blue Road is where you do not know and goes where you do not know, about everything and nothing leads, is the fullness and emptiness, the silence that dominates over everything.
Barbaro is therefore painting as an event, what even mention most things, but only now the light color. This painting has become essence, breath thin, revealed in a transparent, mysterious because only resting intonation that makes the weather. Yet never explained, without words, one mind with the direction of the wind in the oasis before nightfall. In a country where blooms the moon over the dunes and almond trees, and losing is not an adventure but the fear of man across borders, who knows if they exist, too far apart to be known.