For his first solo show at the MAN in Nuoro, Pastorello (Sassari, 1967) conceived a corpus of works whose concept arises from a rereading of the Apocryphal Gospels, more precisely from the death and assumption into heaven of the Virgin Mary. For the occasion, the artist chose to paint woodland landscapes and dark woods that open up to celestial visions, in an ascent steeped in mystery. The shapes, evoked according to a few distinctive features, resort to primary volumes and a compact structure that recalls the courtly tradition; the interweavings of colour, which recall tree rhizomes as well as a surreptitious gesture painting, act as a preamble to the figure of the Madonna – doubled in the redemptive image of the Queen of the world, beautiful, rich and fertile (Madonna delle Grazie), and in the opposite in that of a humble, poor and fragile woman (Madonnina) – who becomes a concrete and at the same time ethereal presence.

The late Gothic and early Renaissance Madonnas here rise to an unreal and metaphysical dimension; they become e-static figures, wrapped in silky robes, rendered with a simple, almost disarming, volume. The abstraction, the essentiality, the static nature of these works are part of a great imagination that rereads the history of art, with a gaze that lingers in the presence of Giotto, Beato Angelico, Simone Martini, Masaccio, Paolo Uccello. The great tradition of Italian painting is revisited by the artist in an absolutely contemporary key, bringing together his own artistic research (from the atomistic-cosmic paintings of the 1990s to the bestiaries/primer books of the following decade, up to the “brides” and “children” of the most recent, which are all equally an “attempt to say simple things, an act of faith towards the world”).

Pastorello conceives of painting and subjects as “potentially capable of becoming anything without moral impediments”. Just like a diamond, his work has within it a grace and crystalline purity that reverberates in an infinite number of facets. Visionary, intimate, poetic, revolutionary, the artist’s plurality manages to infuse an evocative charge into the works, in which the mysteries of faith and the panic sense of humanity lead to a journey of knowledge. A journey that skillfully mixes the two-dimensionality of the great masters of the past, the spatial devices of illustration and the alienating colors of the playful-pop world. The means to give shape to these mental alchemies is the only painting which, applied with patient and meticulous glazes, gives life to a complex reality, to a hyper-iconic universe.

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