Recollections….memories…..signs of recognition….touching and intangible, suspended and ethereal; in praise of immortality.

Roberto Pupi penetrates the informal and the conceptual, painting and photography, immobilises the fleeting moment and brings it to life; he evokes the past projecting it into the future. To enter the exhibition is to pass from public to private, to cross the threshold of affections, to go into a shrine to witness a rite which  forever repeats itself in the human mind – the reflection on the meaning of Existence.

In Pupi’s works memento mori (remember you must die) is not an imperative but rather a whisper, a breath of wind, a gentle breeze which goes directly to the heart.

The monumentum is a warning, a caution, a reminder that life and death are indissolubly linked by a transparent thread.

Family albums….. portraits…..photos……How I was and how I am now; spectator and spectaculum the observer and the observed caught up in a subtle game of cross references.

Roberto Pupi’s photo-canvases cannot be considered as being reproducible, they are outside any cliché. The artist, by painting on the photographic image, highlights the unicum, the particular quality which distinguishes one person from another and makes him or her an individual, brings back to life that hidden essence captured at the moment of the sitting and returns it in the form of an emanation blurred with black lead marks.

In the act of the brushstroke the figure disintegrates while, at the same time, it gains prominence.

The aura of the person portrayed dilates and, like a diaphanous fabric, envelops the beholder’s space.

The thin photographic film, transparent and light, known to be perishable, takes shape in the third dimension and assumes a monumental value.

In this way the artist renders the transparent opaque, gives movement to the static and makes the ephemeral lasting.

In tune with the alchemic tradition everything is overturned - high becomes low, positive becomes negative and vice-versa.

In the series of diptychs the torn, disjointed faces are re-formed in an abstract and unusual composition. The portrait does not have to be recognizable, the value lies in the irradiating effect. Thus the human features are transformed into mountainous profiles and assume a cosmic dimension becoming part of the Universe.

The artist portrays his friends in the distant past, their faces concealed or half-hidden with the eyes often highlighted – astonished, frozen, glassy…..childlike faces in porcelain. However, the real protagonist is not the immortalised subject but rather the artist himself.

The images of others, filtered through his own conscience (as in the series of oval portraits with their obsessive repetitions becoming more and more elusive), become a pretext for “keeping a distance”, to exorcise through Art the mythical fear of death.

Roberto Pupi’s MONUMENTA are fixed in silver bromide, use photographic plate in place of marble and are transformed from paper rectangles to plywood parallelepipeds. They are the testimony of a shallow age, where everything burns out immediately, in which each person’s wish is to live on in Memory.

Firenze 1994