Stefano with indefinite emotion I try to recompose some of my thoughts as an introductory moment to the volume which promises to present a synthesis of your artistic diary.
I realize that this is the opportunity to resume and continue with you that dialogue made up of comparisons on the world of graphics, painting and sculpture which began at the end of the sixties of the last century.
It is a path that brings to mind working in your studio, researching graphics, passionate disquisitions while strolling under the arcades in search of new expressions exhibited in the art galleries or while tasting a glass of red in the historic tavern in the center of Bologna.
It is a moment that also marked the building of a deep and lasting friendship.
Today, with different experiences settled on the passing of time and on reciprocal long silences, I have the opportunity to re-read and read your works in their temporal succession.
I am aware that the honest and punctual testimony of a meticulous research that follows an always current and undated canvas is proposed without a break in your artistic experience.
In fact, your tenacity is always present in capturing the expressions of living in a context from which your personal and sincere cultural research emerges, translating color and matter into a sign, into painting-sculpture, into sculpture-painting.
And here, even today as in the past, the effect of a hasty reading of your works urges me not to hold back my irritation since it seems to me that in your work the search for giving your thoughts rules prevails.
But as then as soon as I think I have glimpsed these rules, irritation, they dissolve into a new projection and I then become aware of sensations and ideas that are mine alone.
And emotion is reborn by perceiving the pleasure you feel in your way of proceeding marked by a natural humility that is translated and relived in the conceptuality expressed.
Your aged woods, your colours, your pleasure of using hand-crafted papers, your pictorial geometries manage to dialogue with the dictionary of the present in a balanced relationship guided by a shy presence that shares a continuous experience with your reader cultural.
Those who look at your works are led to search in the most intimate of their knowledge in the desire to share or criticize the path of your research which takes on a personal value in the tenacious need to close yourself up, to isolate yourself in the strong and pleasant desire to propose and re-propose your artistic expressions also as the result of a refined knowledge of the technique and of a wise artisan culture.
These creative moments guided by a careful and measured formal cleanliness allow you to compose your own card to be included in the complex expressive mosaic of today's art.
Stefano even if with sincere reluctance you finally wanted to tell yourself in this volume with the desire to communicate your emotions-opinions with the awareness that they do not constitute a point of arrival… and your research continues.
Bologna, November 2008
Carlo Malerba