This collection of works is a documentation, and definitive proof of the type of art produced by Massimo Caruso, and also a valuable indication of the development of his art from its origins. Like the alchemist’s discipline, concerned with the transformation of the fire of ‘athanor’, which leads to a process of evolution and inner growth, the complicated development of Massimo Caruso’s pictorial technique proceeds alongside his spiritual evolution.

Portraits, seascapes, landscapes are all the result of a personal language, liberated from both over-elaboration and stylistic immobility, which has rediscovered the secret of expression through colour. The surgical precision of the draftsman develops into dense and meaningful colour as the work of art appears, as if predestined, on the white canvas.

Sometimes this language through liberating the power of the subconscious, reaches a cognitive state which transcends visible reality. At other times the cromatic contrasts of his Abstract and Informal art, free the artist from reproducing objective themes and instead communicate the complex sentiments which move his spirit.

This is therefore painting which borrows from unconscious or conscious rationality to then be transferred and manifest in a cognitive dimension. It is through this constant investigation between the dialectic of the subconscious and that of conscious intelligence that the work of Massimo Caruso becomes a creative transcription of the emotions he experiences.

Besides the tones full of colour and the semplification of the forms, Caruso seems to share with artists of the Fauvism movement his impetuous aspiration towards liberty and autonomy in the artistic creation of visual conventions. As Marcel Duchamp stated, painting should be related to the intelligence of the mind, not just purely visual. And the work of Massimo Caruso seems to us to have succeeded in this attempt to bring painting back to serve the mind and poetry.

In his paintings he often portrays the female figure, inspired by its ideal beauty which is testimony to the attraction and interest of his immagination for women and the female universe. His icons, caught in dreamy and mysterious poses, represent that feminine ideal which we all share, the unconscious need for woman and her values. They are works which celebrate the meeting between Logos and Eros, between man and woman, sun and moon. A marriage through which woman returns once again to signify a muse and inspiration as well as the saviour of mankind.

There is a visual way to appreciate the paintings of Massimo Caruso, on which one can judge their significance on an aesthetic level. But there is a more direct way of looking at the artist’s universe: visualize his works in a symbolic way, almost as if they were “mandala”, the Buddhist representation of the cosmos, and then penetrate their meaning through the shadings of the colours, the pantheistic love of nature, and the refined spirit of the author, the essence of a mature humanism and a deep faith in the values of the Absolute. In this way each painting becomes the starting point from which to take a voyage towards a higher level of awareness.

Federico R. Neri.