Mappe di colore

Walter Zironda

Standing in front of Walter Zironda’s works, one is allowed to wonder what you are looking at; whether the image is made of portions of evocative colors, or whether it is made of a shape that is entrapped among the brush strokes. The answer probably includes both solutions. Walter Zironda, an artist hailing from Vicenza, moves, in fact, across the dual dimensions of representation and abstraction, developing a non-figurative and allusive language at the same time. It is for this reason that Zironda’s painting cannot be defined as completely abstract, since even if it is not possible to distinguish a subject, it is as if beneath the color a transfigured image were hiding from the passing of the brush stroke. The pictorial research begins with a shape - a body that in the explicitly figurative works assumes the fleshiness typical of Francis Bacon’s painting - whose perception, after the process of abstraction, is made possible by a sensitive plastic quality, rather than by the remaining traces of those shapes. The impression is that the subject, nested inside the artwork, is animated by an internal energy so powerful that it makes it explode or even move in space. The movements born from twisting and stretching, whose extension must follow the physical limits of the extremities of the body, translate into the dynamic movement of the color that makes the forms undistinguishable. The palette used by Walter Zironda, like the one used by Lucian Freud for his nudes, contributes to this final vision, since it is composed of earthy colors and flesh-toned tints. Moreover, on a chromatic level, the darker tones of brown and black lend a higher intensity character to the painting, introducing a sense of ambiguity and disturbance.

The fundamental subject of the artwork, whatever its nature may be, is the starting point of the creative process. This is demonstrated not only by the fact that the artist himself defined his painting as a graphic action, but also by the titles of the most abstract works, all eloquently denominated as “Forma” (‘shape, form’). Starting with the figure, what determines its distortion is the presence of an internal emotional state, be it anger, anguish or apprehension, which becomes the trigger of the frenzied motion of the image. The perception of conflagration - restrained but still directed outwards - is amplified by the significant dimensions of the support and by spatial organization: it is as if the color were concentrated in a fluctuating and floating nucleus, that subsequently explodes (or implodes) within the rarefied atmosphere of the canvas. The body hiding behind the brush strokes, the projections of the movements that it makes, reveals its presence not only thanks to the sense of plasticity that it engenders, but particularly thanks to the emotional tension that it emanates; that is, an energy that from the center dissolves into the surrounding space.

Walter Zironda, Forma, 2015
oil on canvas
150x150 cm

Walter Zironda, Forma, 2015
oil on canvas
100x150 cm