Paolo Carosone

" Holy pictures ", popular prints, ex-voto offerings, illustrations from scientific books of the last century, pistols, targets, the brilliant classmate who fires off the right answers with the implacable accuracy of a machine-gun, asexual women and highly-sexed dolls, clocks, the Arabian Phoenix, self-portraits that are not over narcissistic, fretwork friezes done by a maniac grandfather, handlebar moustaches, typewriters as instruments of torture, a machine for altering the shape of tour nose, revolver bullets, the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari scaled-down to make a playroom for a " Little chemist ", a lock, a bolt, Eve and a headless Adam, cherubim, stucco frames, rivets (the list could be continued): these are the some of the ingredients than Paolo Carosone makes use of with obsessive repetition, miring them up, bouncing them back from one plate to the next throughout the whole corpus of his graphic works which has now become laden with nostalgia for childhood, tics, absurd daydreams, a diary of traumata and anguish exorcized by use of the imagination and practical joking, with a lucid pose that implies a conscious awareness of reality that is even sorrowful.
The commentary that Carosone has been working on for a couple of years now (with surprising maturity for so young an artist) with a restless absent-mindedness and compound heterogeneity of his own, is coherent and organic in a way that nobody else has achieved. Carosone talks of nobody but himself, he tells his own story, shows his own way of confronting life and the things lie succeeds - more or less consciously - in bringing up from the depth of his own being. We cannot speak of Surrealism with reference to his graphics, or the relatively fees works of painting he has produced, and yet it is a sort of sui generis surrealism which is absolutely spontaneaous. A surrealism, not assumed as a consciuos means of formal expression, but originating out of the autobiographical and preponderately psychological material from all levels which he has chosen for his discourse (a soliloquy rather than a dialogue). It is a surrealism without ideology and, lastly, one that abhors the categories for defining style -which have now become orthodox practice for many present-day " New Figuratives " in decking out the antiquated " Humanistic " rhetoric. Carosone's work would certainly provide a rich harvest for an analyst. But, this does not concern us here, except to point out again, by demonstrating - to the point of absurdity if you wish - the very personal and private nature of his poetic world, which becomes public only and inasmuch as it is poetic, in that it is achieved artistically. Carosone's stories, fairy-tales, belong, as such, to him and to nobody else; but his narrative qualities belong to everybody He is a grown-up child, intent on recuperating - beyond the ever-increasing burden of mass-culture and industrialization - a world of memories, idolizing in the meantime a pre-industrial world of craftsmen -which probably never existed, at least not as he represents it. Carosone has fashioned an Eden for himself with myths which may be squalid and absurd in themselves, but his imagination achieves the transformation " into something rich and strange ". He uses his deliberately awk-ward, infantile, caricaturing sign to offend, dress-up and mime-out the various episodes.
Carosone literally turns the traditional techniques of engraving inside out: he superimposes plates and combines etching, lithography, monotype and photographic reproduction. An astounding craftsman, he is perpetually in search of new ways of astonishing especially himself. He uses the different techniques to work: out a highly-stimulating game, moving the pieces on his chessboard according to the same standard by which he is inspired by irregular and bizzare
Materials - apparitions from his interior world, moments of existence rather than ways of working.
Carosone's profoundly ambiguous art has its " double "- as Artaud would put it - in life. It is a paraphrase of life to exactly the same extent as his life is a paraphrase of art. The absurdities and ambiguities that permeate these disquieting sheets have verv deep roots, and the exteriority of his forms (chosen deliberately and with absolute clarity of intention) only goes to confirm this.

CESARE VIVALDI
(Calcografia Nazionale, Roma. Aprile-Maggio 1966 )

(English translations by W. F. McCormick)