Gaudì Tribute by Sergio Davanzo

His name is Sergio Davanzo. Strong in expressing his thoughts but tender in cuddling his dreams, he shows you unsuspected and unexpected aspects of his inner self. Sometimes he reveals them slowly, step by step; sometimes he shows them off abruptly, with a touch of challenging scoff. He paints. He paints because of an unsolved mixture of reasons. He paints because he needs to. Because he wants to. He paints to play. He paints because he has to paint.

Several of his works are the product of a deep need to communicate. The need to go beyond the limits of human words, beyond time and space, beyond conventional shapes with the aim of creating new and better ones, more intensely beautiful, giving thus voice to his inner and more complex thoughts.

Other works issue from Davanzo’s mere, instinctive wish to let himself go to the poetical evocation of images and feelings he has seen and lived. This inevitably pursues the connivance of his spectators, who can see and perceive his same sensations, deeply feel them and, by feeling, revive them. The result is an amazing range of ways and synaesthetical contaminations, both of colour and matter.

In Davanzo’s modus operandi often a single idea develops into a theme. It expands itself, defining autonomously its own leit motives. They are varied and widened, offered in their most flattering nuances. The original idea then swells to its utmost and, finally exhausted, it blows up. It is a definite resolution. Therefore Davanzo’s works, which follow a common vein until it is exhausted, can mainly be contextualized in groups. But, once he has finished with a vein of inspiration, sometimes the painter has already found in its ashes the beginning of several new ones. Sometimes he would rather wait before letting them catch his instinct and his paint-brush.

This is the process of painting for Sergio Davanzo. His subjects are various and different. He wants to tell as much as possible. The faces, the voices of past and present time, the places which have seen him growing both as a man and as an artist. His dog. His family. Those who have gone. Those who still have to come. A wrinkle on a forehead. The hissing of a lathe in a work shop. A minimal kaleidoscope of images, epiphanic moments which he fixes on his canvas. And which, if necessary, he moves, as he usually says “to the space”.

Certainly the imaginative titles he gives to his paintings are part of his seriocomic way of living and conceiving one’s necessities. They are delicious, often sharply ironic, and at first they astonish you, to let you eventually deal with a wake of reflection, whetting you as the back-taste of rum in a just baked cake, the recipe for which has been written and performed by Sergio Davanzo just for you. (Maria Sole Politti)