"No one can escape from the world better than through art and no one can be closer to the world than through art." Goethe's sentiment designates the position and the philosophical position of Pindaros, which takes a distance from things but afterwards adopts them to construct a new formal order that describes and expresses a new reality, even if it is through its own contamination.

The artist's formal order does not in fact play on pure accumulation, on the casualness of assemblage, which metaphorically duplicates the quantitative dissemination of the external world. On the contrary, the work assumes a phenomenological cadence supported by a strong metaphysical order. Not in the sense of accumulation, therefore, but rather of a necessary
interpenetration, at the same time inhabited by unpredictable relations. This formal unpredictability of the painting is amplified by an intense chromatic juxtaposition and elaboration of signs which together push the work to the limit of geometry.

The artist's painting (and this is also true of his ink drawings) presents a composition where everything is subject to a new formal order in which one can read an involuntary metaphysics. The strength of abstraction of the work undoubtedly tends towards a new order of beauty. This order of beauty is born of a cultural attitude that includes the responsibility of a typical
Mediterranean tradition. To speak of the responsibility of this tradition in the context of Pindaros's work means, above all, to capture the constant presence of a pictorial body as the sum of sedimented ideas that open themselves to diverse questions: pure painting, geometry and colour, gesture and surface, the renewal of the mythology of degree zero, addition and
subtraction, constructivity, a new version of the pictorial project.

Today we know that painting can perform the same movements as in the past, and yet it
is not helpful to anyone to repeat the history of painting of the Sixties, not even as a precarious memory of the present. The question in Pindaros's work, therefore, is not concerned with a rhetoric regarding the constitutive processes of painting; these are already introjected and superseded. Painting returns to find itself alone in front of itself, its history - lonely, but
free to choose its own horizon, visible and invisible, possible and impossible. For this reason, it is painting distanced from the conceptual trap, a body ideas and passion that must be understood in its own substantial difference from other fashionable modes of communication, in that never-ending journey founded in a practice of communicating inexhaustible form and colour.

When we meet a painter and his work the sensation is that of glimpsing a reality of thought and attitude more grounded and convincing than we find in an art of today that seeks to rediscover itself in contemporary systems of communication. In fact, in thinking of the image of the painter as the last survivor of an art that cannot compete with the rhythm of mass media, we uncover a kind of implicit revalidation of this apparently marginal dimension. There is, in other words, a consciousness of the specificity and actuality of the pictorial process that touches on the sense of a renewed mythology around the painter, one who is conscious that he can establish rules and attitudes outside any pretext that is not reducible to painting, his own history and transformation. The figure of the painter is considered a very appropriate
image to express a sense of positive survival in a world consumed by images.

This groundedness of painting and the painter are not expressed in the pure desire to paint, nor in an academicism of internal form or colour, but rather are determined above all as feeling, linking painting to existence, to a value of rediscovery without recycling the existential factor of the 1950s. If we can attribute a centrality to the role of the painter, an importance that is practical and theoretical, it is because it is an action which can be stimulating within the various interrogations around art and its meanings today. In the face of the declaration of the historical death of painting there exists a will to express, in the durability of the work, the full
meaning of the truth of the work itself, of the construction of a contemporary consciousness of painting. Painting is a form of thought that never confuses itself with cultural gymnastics; these often do no more than amplify the image and in this way falsify the real terms of aesthetic research. It is therefore possible to imagine painting as a zone in which the value of interiority is strongly preserved in the face of an increasing exteriorisation by mass languages.

An artist like Pindaros, an attentive and vital artist of the present, proves this to us through his solitary way of working, rarely seeking confirmation from the art world since the work itself is nourishment enough. In fact the artist speaks of the work as each time a new beginning without repetition or exhaustion. The meaning of his painting is to be found in a space in which colour is a mobile element; between the proposition of the support, the shaped canvas, and
the act of layering colour, an unpredictable mechanism of imagination is released. In Pinaros's work colour is the gift of impalpability and transparency, which renders the surface a place of enchantment and absolute transfiguration. As the artist confirms, the work embraces the original creative sensation and is built wholly around the idea of a mobile space - tactile, expansive and alchemical - grasped as a continuous challenge to the vastness of the surrounding ambience, one that seeks to break through any possible limits.

Pindaros's work refers to its own history of Sixties hard-edged painting as well as the historical avant-garde from the Futurists to Mondrian, but with the necessity to found again the space of dissemination and to capture new meaning in which colour resists temporality, producing a durability without disciplinary limits. In this way it confirms a familiar desire: the vastness
of the white wall, of the flight of the gaze from one point to another in space, the stability of geometric form (open triangles crossed by lines) in an incalculable equilibrium. The concept of dissemination is always felt by Pindaros in different ways: as a practice of the displacement of tactile sensation, from which the elements of colour are nourished and launched in
pictorial space with an intense concentration.

The model is rhythm, sustained by chromatic values to the point of spatial dilatation, in this way annulling the apperceptive limits of the support. The geometric images become details of
a vibrant and infinite flux in which we feel the concentrated energy within the transforming organisation of signs. A strong dynamism rather than an extension beyond the painting itself. The work is a cosmic expansion of the limit of the support, a dematerialised surface that surrenders to strong chromatic light, to that sublime apperception of things: the eye corresponds to the mind in surfaces orchestrated by vision.

The most recent canvases create a constant vibration of the pictorial field from which emerges an internal movement within the constitution of the image, an uninterrupted trajectory that creates transversal pathways. Variations of chromatic intensity create zones of condensation and expansion. Pindaros's work is able to conjugate the disseminating structure of colour signs with the emotion of dematerialised space, virtual, capable of evoking the dimension of
elsewhere. And it is exactly this tension, this central point where the artist expends his own pictorial obsession, where the idea of painting becomes the foundation for the knowledge of reality.

The artist (the painter), this anachronistic inventor of form, presents a slow and inexhaustible challenge to the levelling of an aesthetic value now deprived of experience. What counts
mostly for Pindaros is to remove from painting the old masks and make it vibrate with a new intensity, each time responding to the work's own interior energy - to produce astonishment, an apperception that plays on fragments of space shifting across surfaces as particles of a vision that magically recomposes itself again and again. These are all problematics which return to
painting the space of action, of a slow and conscious transfiguration of the field of apperception, where colour finds again its central role: that depth of reference that never exhausts itself, that language impossible to domesticate.

As the sensitive art of Pindaros shows us, this centrality of colour is vital to the aesthetic value of contemporary art.

The Alchemy of Colour
Stella Santacatterina