Sea trips, on the beach, interiors, memory. Constants of a vision. Each one of these subjects crowds the language of Enzo Amedola along a course which, in his immediate work, may strictly and didactically suggest narrative. Unity in difference characterizes the individual phases of an expressive process like his, but at the same time it raises other considerations. It leads us to suppositions which help to analyse motivations closely linked to the psychology of the profound. It explains itself.

The argument is made manifest by the narration. Therefore it becomes a question of establishing the terms of something so specific. What it really come to is the clarification of how much reality can and will be suggested in figurative objectivity. Hence the obvious complexity of every situation. Fixed and motionless, the figures crowd the space of the image and the space of the spectacle.

Mostly young and, in their way, they evoke a sort of modernity, a sort of sensitive inclination towards the look of our days,: the colour, the attitudes. But immediately after, you are aware of the loneliness each of them is wrapped in. You realize how fixed their gaze is. In the air there is a tremor of silence that engulfs a singular metaphysical abstraction. They can only exist under domination: no conversation, no exchange of glances. Together, yes, but each following thoughts of their own. At the heart of a concept of living like this one, we find the artist with his anxieties, his memories, his melancholy.

Viaggio n.3 (1992)

A melancholy not to be renounced,; nor is it available for the annulment of the relationship. Certainly, in an attempt to realize it in terms of knowledge, it is entirely directed to the reversal of such a condition, by exercising the exterior components which melancholy can only intensify. Inserted in a psychological and intellectual circle of this kind, the external world assumes another dimension; it appears on the canvas with a meaning that is prevalently evocative (rather than emotive) filtered through the light of colour which limits and defines the spaces on the flat areas.

It is a colour that neither incises nor deforms, but settles affectionately upon the bodies, making the ochres, the reds, the intense blues and whites transparent; and blocked as they are, they absorb the refractions of the dust from the atmosphere. It is as though Amendola were watching what is going on from an oblique position, from the corner of an imaginary stage. In this way the limits of real space become a window opening onto the scene: the high horizon, a beach that cuts the scene diagonally, the events observed as if through a metaphysical spy-glass. This is the essential aspect of Amendola’s painting even if there are echoes of “plastic values” in the air. The absence-presence of the action remains even when exteriors pass into interiors; in the fixity of a certain image reflected in a mirror, or discourses with classical pieces in a Museum. An interior dimension therefore which the artist translates into limpid visuality.

Vito Apuleio
Paintings and Sculptures n° 19, 1996