Svegliami is a work dedicated to the pleasure of waking up, to the moment in which the body begins once again to take on weight in space. The diptych presented in the exhibition immediately left me with the following sensation: that of an apparent lightness in persistent contrast with the physicalness and dimension of the painting. Everything is absorbed by the warm blackness of the space and on the canvas only subtle lights that draw out the geography of the canvas are seen to ‘run’. The lightness, the pleasure of silence and the flowing of time are the elements that Grimaldi looks for in continuation in placing himself and putting us in relation to this work.
The choice of staging a dialogue between the paintings of the Svegliami cycle and the series of the Armadi [Wardrobes] comes from Marco’s desire to always relate to the coupled element: two paintings make up Armadio and two series of paintings make up the exhibition. The double canvas is not a caesura but helps to shift the univocal nature of the pictorial image towards a true territory of painting. A hierarchy doesn’t exist between the two canvases: there is not a first and a second but the one relates to the other in the same place for a sole action. The incidence of the support as the place of painting is undoubtedly important for Grimaldi who together with the dimensional component always integrates the intentionality of the pictorial gesture. A plural painting for a sole meaning.
But why Armadi? Because these works are the reservoirs of the memory, they mark the reflective presence and represent an opening to the most profound interiority. In these one finds a two-fold phase, mental and material, the physicalness of things. Signs, forms and references to almost figurative elements are always combined and a dialogue with a spiritual part made up of rarefied atmospheres which in some way refer to that state of sleep and dream recently investigated by Grimaldi in the Svegliami sequence. Thought and painting reciprocally interpenetrate in an unstoppable alternation, impossible to ‘fix’ or ‘set’. Hence the illusionary ability of painting to lead us into a highly imaginative world becomes concrete in something that attracts and magnetises the spectator’s perception, to the extent that this is possible, bringing him closer to that noble process that every time transforms a thought into lexis and emotion.