Complex as it may be, the presence of tactile elements is constantly returning in contemporary painting: this might be, but it is just a personal impression, due to a clear tendency to some kind of empiricism we have been accustomed to by everyday life.
It’s even more likely that, just because of the highly tactile aspect intrinsic in its nature, materic painting makes every work more concrete, less “simulation” and more “intuition and urgency”. Giancarlo Sarvese seems to have grasped this vital aspect spreading from the environment of abstract art avant-garde, embracing and re-interpreting it in such a way as to obtain a constantly evolving formula.

Sarvese appears to head out on the slow and difficult route that all artists undertake within the universe of their own intentions and anxieties, through two different and only apparently opposed methods, yet having weight as their common denominator.
It is in the pondus, the means by which the artist sows the seed of his own creation, that lies the cornerstone which adds weight to the support. This creates layers of colour, robust veins capable of generating themselves, in their magmatic evolution, both full and empty spaces, multiple substrates shining through in a paradoxical assonance of presence and absence of weight, despite the powerful presence of tactile elements.

It is precisely this weightlessness that seems to find its place in the latest works, where Sarvese does not completely give up the efficient modus operandi of his early paintings to give way to an evolution resembling some digs of archaeological souls and moods.

It is not easy to deal with any material preventing it from becoming a déjà-vu.
Sarvese faces it effectively and with lots of energy, thus overcoming in his works another big and not unusual hurdle: the perfect fusion of technical mastery and emotions that every artwork should feature.

Michele Govoni
January 2014