Elio Pastore uses the new technologies to create mental worlds. He does it using the experience and the taste of a person who has always mastered the traditional art, for his own personal and reckless undertaking.
The "Virtual Art" that comes out from the computer screen, manipulating programmes and images is nothing else that the contemporary expression, what will be in the future, of the new way of the painter's making art. One of the question could be in such a creative sector the subject, the content of the work of art is not fully or partly replaced by the instrument or by its employment.
Infact, to create artificially an image by using the keyboard, the mouse and the computer can bring the author to unexpected results, to center his interest more on the formation of the image than on the ideas that is the hub of his activity.
His work can be a form of elaboration of the content that almost replace the subject itself. In Elio Pastore's work, on the contrary, the digital art is even an instrument to define the originality of his own fantastic universe, to tell fairy tales that hide, behind the appearance of the story, symbols and metaphors, teachings and universal values.
As in a tale, in a parable, from the single part is defined the universal and vice versa: that is also the structure of the so called "Fractal Art" always different from the structure, unique and unrepeatable, even if endlessly repeated as in the throng of snowflakes, in the cosmic heap of galaxies, in the casual formation and dissolution of the clouds.
There is some of Pop Art in this use of multiplying the image, but the Art made by Pastore, obviously, goes beyond the concept of a statement against the consumption on which Andy Warhol's thought and work founded; to reach and define a new aesthetic and stylistic meters in which the forms, the colours and the lines defining the space follow one another, repeat and run one after another in highly imaginative and kaleidoscopic whirls.
As keeping intact, in each of his work of art, something that reminds to the figurative arts, as a link to reality, the most mature side of Pastore's personality, is his contamination of the arts genres, a sort of creative globalisation where the uniqueness of the work of art mingles with the universality.
From photography to the traditional painting, from the drawing to the Virtual Art, from the electronic elaborations to the traditional experimentations, Pastore has been able to find an equilibrium his thoughts revolve around, giving origin to surreal and dreamlike worlds, but also perfectly real, because his thoughts originating from an authentic love for the Art and for the beauty.
"The only way to make experiences that is not possible to make in real terms is only through the art and the literature" said Solzenitsyn, and perhaps it is just that hope, that illusion to push the artists to compare to the "otherness" of the existence.
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Elio Pastore, uses as his work instrument the computer. His research, has started from a long experience as a photographer and travel documentary film maker, he is today involved in a more abstract and deep journey inside the computer and of its mathematical and geometrical systems - the so-called fractals. Through the elaboration of these "items", Pastore tries to support the medium with his emotions.
Infact, after having taking picture of the reality as it was with the camera, he had the necessity to reverse the speech completely and to give priority not to the vision of the reality, but to the emotion, to the feeling that his eyes gave him in the moment he caught reality.
In his works of art, therefore, it is not important the image, but what the image can stir him up.
So we can look at them quickly, and being captured by them that they immediately send back to something that stimulate a memory, an emotion, a smell and looking at them with more consideration the deep side can emerge only thanks to a moment of attendance and of a slow reading.
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Elio Pastore arrives at these present works of art from a gradual refusal of the real objective vision.
He has been a photographer and reporter for a long time and he has, little by little, abandoned his camera to devote himself to a more technological elaboration of the image, at the beginning starting from his own clicks that were then pictorially transformed ,and later, thanks to the technical evolution, starting completely from the beginning creating his compositions with the computer.
In 2000 he starts studying the Fractals, that offer him a great imaginative world.
These geometrical pictures, whose endless repletion doesn't only mean a simple multiplication, but it means the application of new rules, it gives life to a world in which the casuality of the forms must be submitted to the author's emotions who in his turn gives it to the viewer.
The first thing in which is Pastore is interested in is, infact, to transmit who is looking at his works of art the same sensations he has had watching a landscape, listening to a particular music, or simply living daily life, with anxieties and happy moments.
So, Abstraction, in a successful gist in which the artist can put together the principles of the virtual dynamism that the computer gives and those of an initial standstill, that is the reflection on the work of art.
Elio Pastore's art is pregnant of a precious and daring matter of art, it is precious because it uses intense tones and of well-balanced volume and space; daring because he is able to range deftly among traditional compositions of works of art, then re-examined with his great inspiration as in his "Natura morta con bottiglie" (Still life with bottles) in 2000, and others that lap on almost abstract measures; as in the "Cutting Edge" taken as an example, a work of art done in 2003.
Inspiration and imagination are the real peculiar features of this skilful artist.
Introduction of the personal exhibition "Furrowing the paper rainbows" (Bis Art Gallery, Buttigliera Alta - Italy)
Elio Pastore, as every artist lies.
He lies with the honesty of an artist who creates, because he does not paint but he creates: this is the dragging motif that has led him to choose the Fractal art.
The Fractal Art, whatever we think or say, is an art strictly figurative and for Elio Pastore, the figurative art becomes as a necessity Fractal in the sense that for fractality intended the whole, the universal and so even the particular, the smallest one.
"Il bosco virtuale" is not a wood, as "Le code del drago" are not, in a strict sense, anything or they are a reflex of "L'isola delle maree" a small, infinitely tiny, splash of the foam of the tide.
The fractality, that becomes in the series of small runs fractalism, is a lens that magnifies and makes small according to the creator's will, that can recombine the omnipresent matter every time.
In "L'attesa" nothing prevent that the lady at the window has appeared at the end of the arcades ("Portici II"), but how often will she appear at the window? Maybe, a unique long time - because "L'attesa" is a unique specimen on canvas - or twenty short moments, that is to say, the exact number of the printings of the arcades.
Why the Fractal has to be unique and serial?
Unique because the form is always unique, unrepeatable, still in its brief magic of the creation, the stillness (the inactivity, the emptiness) of the photography, like the stillness of the ariels views of the Berlin radio by Lazlo Moholy-Nagy.
Serial because every form is never the same form, but a frantic example of the natural repetition of everything: of the tide, the woods, the expectation, the portrait, the boats, the sky, the terraced countryside.
In this way we return to the above assumption: Elio Pastore is lying.
The girl with the circle by De Chirico is unique like the giraffe in flame by Dali, while Elio Pastore's works are an only one work of art that repeats itself endlessly from different angles (as the "Bulls" and the "tauromachies" by Picasso) under the lens as said before, because the fractal reality is a unique example of itself.
From this the charm of each work, whatever is the stand on which the image is printed, allowing us to look at the other works with a composed and careful alchemy, as a quotation of an old book never written.
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The computer from a work tool is turned into a paintbrush, into a sculptor chifel to shape the Kora with, the primordial clay that the real world supplies to the artist, giving him the potentiality of the demiurge, the creator of the universe (..)
The Universe that, from the virtuality of the imagination and of the emotion, passes to the virtuality of the screen to come to light at the end,under the form of tangible and striking furrows of colours on the paper.
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The group formed by Massimo Castronuovo, Claudio Guasti and Elio Pastore, so close that have decided to show their works in collective exhibitions, leaving out in their art production the identity of vision characterizing each of them.
The unique thread of the works of these artists seem to be the search of a dimension ideal and timeless in which to put the the vision that inspired them their works of art. After this first step, everything is divided, from the technique to the choice of the method they use to tell the vision itself.
For example, Castronuovo, entrusts it with bodies formed by the intersections of waves, suspended in the empty space as Magritte used to do.
The images by Guasti recall, on the contrary the oneiric vision, putting tangible objects in an irreal and fictitious context. Pastore, that not rarely, uses his camera like a precognitive instrument of his subject, he de-contextualizes it putting it in a context where time seems not to go by.
The merit of their exhibitions, that is not very common, is to present three completely different ways of drawing inspiration from the same source, re-proposing completely different pictorial genres.
It is a very unusual way to expose works of art for a group of rising painters that we find only in few big exhibitions (among which the recent "Luci del Mediterraneo" in Turin, Palazzo Bricherasio) and we hope that it can be of good wish for this group whose artistic production started at the beginning of the 90s.
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In Elio Pastore's works we can find a timeless world, magic and poetic which create pictorial images thanks to the elaboration of the graphics of the computer art, where the poetry of the image of an old lady going upstairs in an old village is transformed into an artistic expression evoking the use of the watercolour painting and of other painting techniques.
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Reality is reflected in itself, pretending not to be in its main generalizations, in the worlds and ideal faces electronically created by Elio Pastore. The result is not a referential function of the real, that is filtered, modified, cancelled and re-established to his own vision of the world.
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Elio Pastore uses the computer to obtain perfect images of courtyards, front doors houses, walls, interiors of portico and railings. Two boats are stopped one close to the other on a shiny water of shadows representing, maybe, eternal loneliness, still present even when we are in two.
The formal polish of the pictures is a continuous search of a deep introspective analysis: desire of perfection, but of refinement too. In a chaotic world and full of coarseness the images produced with the computer shine as a message of hope lost in the time of expectation.
