Roses, only roses. This insistence nearly obsessive on one object, on one theme, on one way of looking with a sharp focus struck me from the beginning.

If it's true, as a great writer and literary critic, Oscar Wilde, said, that an artist always repeats the same work, it's even true that this same work always repeated often takes very different features. It can be said in some way that the work inserted in a continuum of chances is identical for more or less deep structures, but thereafter the singles apparitions look different on the surface. Here, on the opposite, we are in front of a repetition that isn't regarding only style, object, technique of representation, light, stillness, shadows. The repetition concerns more the way of looking at the world.

What these roses show? Before all the desire to put a sharp focus on the objects, so sharp to distort dimensions, making them impressive. Try to be sure. If you go very close to a thing, suddenly you will find a perception threshold that will make it huge, gigantic, enormous. This thing will stop being proportioned, and you will perceive it no more as a substance of the world, but as a fancy and unreal element.

Moreover, looking close involves a detailed analysis of the world. With unbelievable consequences. Here again, all you need is to try: and to see that each body unexpectedly seems not to have a skin any more; it will have roughness, wrinkles, severities; it will stop to look as a hard container, nearly vitreous, impenetrable. And, again with an unreal vision, it will begin to show itself as extremely material, complex, irregular: much more vital and used that we can believe.

A third discover due to closeness is the non-existence of colours. Or, better, the fact that natural colour is never compact, fixed, uniform. You get closer and red is effectively red, white is white, green is green. But each colour changes on and on, takes shades, alterations, fractures. Monochrome ends in a fantastic polichromy, more overwhelming than a caleidoscope.

To return passion for detailed observation involves now again a technical choice, and a paradox. Technical choice cannot be the one of realism, but even a hyper-realism. The perfection of a virtuous hand stands necessarily. But the final product is at the same time contraddictory and astonishing.

A realistic exhibition doesn't wait for us, but rather an unreal and fancy one. Our roses don't point at all to an exact life. They are dreams, visions, chimeras. They are among the most abstract things I have been looking at recently. This makes me think if by chance that same sensation of wonderful magic can be found in other cases, historical cases of western art. Thinking for example to unreal carnality of primeval Flemish painting, or of primeval German painting, in short to XV century of the artists from the north or of our Antonello da Messina.

The aim of realistic technique changes therefore into trespassing reality, pretending instead a total adherence to the world. The representation of physiqueness transforms itself into metaphysics. Event, any way, happened again in the art history. It happened when, as a great critic, Ignazio De Logu, wrote, the representation of nature specialises itself in the representation of its singles separated components, and not any more into histories. Men, landscapes, objects out of the context of an action. De Logu called all this "portrait"; people portrait, nature portrait, things portrait. That is, following Italian etymology, "taken from", not "taken in change of", as in the English word "portrait", or in the French one "portrait", or in the Russian one "portret".

Portrait, after all, underlines the fact of taking something from the world, not of reproducing it. But the drawning out not necessarily has equivalence in its model. It can live of its own life. As these works, which truly can be baptised "roses portraits".