Abbagnara paints his expressionist symbolism throughout his canvas, with his constant new elaboration of the art which once belonged to the people of the tribal period. The artist had the opportunity to visit and stay in Africa, Oceania, South America where he was inspired by the imaginative visions of his colleagues who also found some magic and erotic dimensions of the primitive art. Besides this, all they were inspired by the mythical and ritual aspects of the primitive people and their idea of death.

The primitive age declares therefore the need of man to get free from the civilization, which is an unnatural constraint of personal freedom and spontaneity, in order to get back to spontaneity. It is therefore the surrealistic sense of lost which attracts the artist with the shrill voices of his enigmatic characters. The same sense of lost comes out after the characters have lost their historical functionality or after they got free from the “canonical” functions of everyday life.

The primitive artist complies with his personal and emotional temperament and meets a spontaneous and synthetic communication which is very efficient even though the extreme smallness of the artist’s means, beyond the formal convention and under the prevalence of his instinct. He uses an old and primitive language with a simplified style: in architecture, sculpture and painting both the choice of the themes and the choice of the most suitable operating technique are influenced by the simplicity of the old times in order to search the truth and the revival of the language even if opposite positions, abstract and definitely anti-mimetic, will prevail some time later especially in the cubist search.

Here are men transformed into play stations and crying out their right to be and to have. Here are memoirs of aesthetic and anti-aesthetic routes (why not?) : we want to see beyond the near horizons and set against the three dimensions of the real things. We want to set against the psychophysical dimension of painting where the painting itself reacts by representing the horrible things of everyday life, all coming from the human mind and not from nature.

The idea of the “containing skull” brings us to think about the structure of the modern life where men are guided and tuned in a dreadful hyper-reality which is now sick of many data input and constantly overexposed to a lot of information and images. An ordinary human skull could not keep and save all these data any longer and that is why, in a not too far away reality, we come to a “Super Skull” as an expression and identity of the new homo sapiens. So the evolution turns the usual brain case into a more efficient, receptive and capacious room.

The new homo acts and optimizes the reality by means of the head, the crux of the body, now capable of keeping more and more data input and more and more unlimited information, thus banishing the rest of the body to an inert and weak mass, fitted to the lymphatic sustenance only. This piece of art is one and only, unrepeatable, innumerably reproducible.

Abbagnara represents the vision of his super man with big and immortal brains in keeping with his ideas, according to which the new symbiosis will be the one between computer and brain, an always on calculator which transmits, receives and stores all the data inside this unlimited data storage. This one is first shaked and then proposed again in primitive terms, thus reproducing the urban and metropolitan landscape by using symbolical and old images which here are used and explained as the elements of the new tribalism.

In the era of the globalization where everything is reduced to one dimension only, thus levelling the cultural identities, we still see rise attitudes and expressions of spontaneous cultures which claims to a lost originality.

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