F.PIAZZA: VENICE

Critical Notes

Piazza, with meticulous ascetic realism, seems to set aside the standard academic criteria used in judging painting. He seems to surpass the very idea of beauty committing himself more and more to the pursuit of truth.

Having chosen to abandon all preconceived and misleading ideas, and observing the world with the purified eyes of one who has gone beyond circumstance to reach what is sacred, the natural images of the world then reveal themselves in their absolute verity, neither beautiful nor significant, but simply for what they are, each equally a part of a common sacredness.

The serene revolution to be applied to painting was not just to be the discovery of new formal rules which would simply have produced yet another avant-garde or new fashion. What had to be revolutionized above and beyond painting itself was the attitude with which to approach landscape and and the living elements in it, the eye with which to observe it and the mood in which to feel it. It was a search for the sacredness which was to emerge through art.

To compose the elements according to an order other than natural would become violence, almost blasphemy. So the square formed by the canvas or by the virgin plate must be only the mirror of what is sacred, not its definition because what is sacred is undefinable. It is beyond words.

This explains certain ways in which Piazza's paintings and etchings are composed which would have horrified a master of the academy. Flowers and trees appear to be "cut" as if he had framed a corner of the world, knowing that no matter how large it may be, it is just a fragment of reality, whose entirety will always remain outside the frame. All this may appear to be fortuitous, if it were not for the fact that fortuitism is not to be considered in what is sacred. Thus we learn of another of our limits, after that of time and of death, there is our impossibility to define and to know the entire space in which we live.(Sandro Zanotto)

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