PAINT WITH COLORED LIGHT

For some years, Carlo Monastra has been carrying out a research activity on Computer-art alongside the most famous pictorial activity he has been practicing since the late sixties.

We recall his production linked to the New figuration (1967-1977) and still his interest in signified meanings and his rigorous "interferences" (1980-1983). Imaginative diagrams and linear scripts, which have given him, over the years, complex perceptive territories of coloristic grids.

This research, which was decisive for the current phase, led him progressively to identify a parallel to the graphic sign that defined by the "mouse pointer" on the "desk" of the screen of a video connected to a computer.

The virtual sign, then reconstitutes the same intentions, redefines the spaces of the linear trace and of the color made in prirba with the traditional means of the pen and colored inks.

The consistency of the two languages, exhibited in parallel, that do not renounce the sign, nor the color, or rather start from them, evidences the comparative compromise between the traditional use of the canvas as a two-dimensional support and fixed image and the virtual support of the screen.

Pigments or colored lights? 1 different operational fields are a mutual strengthening of the aesthetic choices made in recent years.

The present exhibition combines still the «painting», realized with a spatula and spray, with graffiti, tears and masking interventions, between the invention and the randomness. It relies on the suggestion of the shades and the color values ​​of acrylics and industrial glazes.

On the canvas he translates with variety of grids, of white pylons, architectural flights of lines in each direction arranged, overlapping; an imaginative cross-linking that enhances the suggestions of colors and loads the canvas with virtual depth.

The parallel operation that Carlo Monastra carries out with the computer is carried out in two phases. The first (1984-1988), as an operator, to deepen the medium and know the possibilities of use entrusted to existing programs; the second, as a programmer, activates an unprecedented process enclosed in one of its algorithms.

Virtual pages are the experiential and autonomous result of the AUTOMAT 91 program, pages created in basic language compiled, saved on disk and produced by random parameters of an algorithm, wanted by the painter who choosing between 24 backgrounds and 320 different nibs, produces them to infinity . 1 «nibs» act on the surface by superimposing points, lines, colored patterns according to unlimited variables. Prolonged notes and lenders add sound suggestions.

Before saving the "virtual pages" in the demonstration version, on the monitor it organizes the fields and isolating them to send them to memory, identifying the color ratios highlighted by the subtractive ones and by the random overlays desired by the possibilities of the activated program.

The choice of Monastra is an interesting moment of reflection of his imaginative path.

The results of this exhibition, in the two presented languages, refer to the problem of the renunciation of the poetic nature of the pigmented material, which pretends the colors on a tangible support and the aesthetic use of colored, intangible and invisible colored lights only visually.

All that remains is to await further results of the courageous research he has started, first, in this soporific and unfortunate, because distracted city.

Palermo, April 1991 Nicolò D'Alessandro