University di Camerino

In one of the last Biennal exhibitions of art in Venice, in 1986, was a session devoted to the relationship between art and biology. I remember that had approached works of abstract style with photographic images of cells to the microscope. A whole able to put in crisis the same concept of abstract representation, as if in nature anything corresponded to our imagination. As if the isomorphism were valid proposed by the mathematical studies according to which any “invention” mathematics finds a perfect correspondence in the physical world. Among the illustrious examples, that of the geometries not-euclidean and that of the forecast of planets or stars discovered on the base of pure mathematical calculations. A theme today of great actuality in relationship to the television and its ability to show, with the coordinates of the chronicle, “reality” that nobody has ever seen.

They are some ideas that have crowded me the mind meeting the painter Giuseppe Borrello in his studio, while he is preparing the works that will be exposed to Camerino on the occasion of an international meeting on the transmission in the central nervous system. A conference aimed to deepen that “receptive world” which, beginning from the studies on the acetylcholine, it has constituted one of the essential themes to understand the operation of the brain and to discover medicines able to interfere and therefore also “to adjust” formality of erroneous, pathological communication.

If the Biennial of Venice were combined scientific material and works of art, at Camerino the pictures of Borrello will put together with the chemists, neuroscientists and pharmacologists researches, broadly documented from iconographic material. And also in this occasion, allowing to speak only the images, to someone the doubt will come that a contemporary painter is in reality a scientist and vice versa that a researcher of the brain introduces slides of extraordinary aesthetical effectiveness. An event of great interest; and it is in this light that I looked at the works of Borrello. I have admired them, without having nothing of the critic and above all without the pretension to enter, also only for a moment, in the difficulty field of the contemporary art.

Giuseppe Borrello is a careful painter to the great events of our time, it is known. I remember an exposure introduced in Verona and prepared by the Foundation Miniscalchi on the theme “painting and sport”, when they were about to open the Olympiads. It is as if he was stimulated by the social events and by their great protagonists: the heroes of our time. There is no doubt that Borrello lives of heroes. In these last works, the hero becomes really the scientist, the researcher, which bind discoveries that know how to still give life while death tries to delete it. If once they were the gods to play on the life and death, Borrello seems to say, they are the scientists. He perhaps remembers that with the introduction of the antibiotic, in a few decades, the average age has increased from 47 to 80 years. A life given by the pharmacological sciences.

And it is understood, therefore, because in these works there is some Rambos that stir in the invisible one, climbing on receptors, activating nervous fibers, in short holding in life a body that otherwise he would extinguish. Don't miss the sexual organs, man and woman naked: there is not anything erotic, on the contrary a strength ancestor, that gives note the life. And here that the hero scientist becomes an Adamo and a laboratory turns into a thalamus: places that have to do with the life. I don't know the personality of Borrello. His inner world, but certainly he gives the impression to hold inside of himself a great child, perhaps some capricious, certainly able also to try charm of forehead to every aspect of the life, as if he discovered it just now. A child that maintains his own creative strength and that he knows how to combine pieces of perception within schemes that are not those of the adolescent rationality and of the convention.

So he can clone the same dressing room, as if it were a cell that multiplies many Camerino, all equal and of course all extraordinary. Every child, you know, is afraid: is another feeling baschet staying near this painter who for his body size may be a dark God. Do not fear, but is full of fear, perhaps he dreams of becoming a hero. Nine are the works which he has prepared for this occasion. With the sole exception of a rectangular table, all are round. It is impossible not to think of the symbolism of the nine and the circle that take us back to one side and the other Pythagoreans at Indian Mandala. The circle as everything, like life, perhaps as the collection of knowledge in which every researcher engages to discover a fragment smaller than a grain of sand.

They are three the colors that jump in the palette of Borrello: the white, the gold and the silver. I don't know anything of pictorial technique, but it is sure that the white and the gold are the colors of the mystery and the sacred. The understood sacred to the way of Rudolf Otto as whole charm and fear. On the gold the man goes crazy for centuries: seeking the formula that made it derive even from the stone.

It needs to carefully look at these pictorial medallions since in the undulated signs figures are always discovered that at first sight they escape; all the attention of a researcher is needed and then faces, producing organs, symbols and metaphors are found. As if the daily paper and the banal one were full of secrets and mystery. As the shade of the man, that always follows him, even if he is not sometimes seen. The shade is the metaphor of the life, since without shade he doesn't exist; but also of the death which is shade without body.

After these considerations that are dragged on the charm of the words and their evocative ability, it seems me to be able to say that the initiative of the University of Camerino to mix art, maximum expression of the liberty, with the science, strong example of rigor, is of great effectiveness.

Certainly the old question of the contrary ones, that they have appeared identical to many. Who knows if the scientific discovery were art and the culture of Borrello a spiteful search inside his laboratory in Pigna Street at number one.

Vittorino Andreoli