Nino D'Antonio

Jazz, 1988 - Mixed technique on canvas - cm 150x120 - Private collection Rome

I don't know if Raffaele La Capria know Borrello. But I know that Borrello knows the stretch of coast that runs from Donna Anna as Marechiaro, and perhaps more, of the protagonist of Mortally wounded. And not so much because he was born (the extraordinary paternal fiefdom in disconcerting geography of incorporated place even the small church and the celebrated by Salvatore di Giacomo), as well as a visceral, sensual, and in many respects pathologically to those waters, traveled and lived every day beyond the change of easons, almost irrepressible life fee.

A sea that thirty years ago preserved intact the enchantment and the suggestion that from Greek to English Vedutistis, actually to Giant and Pitloo Posillipo had consecrated in the poetry and in the art. A sea, a coast and the hill consumes to go off, and the tuff offers him to the erosion of water with an ancient voluptuousness, creating cracks and crevices, in a lace course of age.

The meeting with painting is not stranger to the suggestions of the landscape and the widespread presence of artists in the area. Thus were born the first soft watercolors and uncertain. Apparently only a moment's pause in the fevered rapport with the sea, and rather Pippo Borrello leaves classical studies and gives to painting.
The discovery of the artistic environment in Naples during those years more than ever rich of ferments he fascinates. He knows Emilio Notte, and receives encouraging praise; then Guido Biasi, leading exponent of 58 group which takes his first steps on the lowest ground of avant-garde. Many myths are torn down, but many find dissenting judgements. The white surfaces and aseptic proposed by Abstraction, geography of solitary signs, chanting according to a rigorous pace, the absolute absence of the image are made that upset.

But he doesn't refuse anything before having understood his reasons: it is only the way to look for a proper orientation in the tangled panorama of that years. They are meetings -together with those will come during the courses at the Academy - destined to leave a sign and to give a jolt to the landscape creed of the newcomer Borrello, to the point to push and burn on the beach, witness an indifferent moon, his first production after having seen the works of cubistic inspiration.

The privileged relationship with the sea now moves to the painting. “But it was not enough to know and love the sea. Rather. This would have brought me to a painting of representation, and I didn't want. For years I have owed tender to brake the temptation to transfer on the canvas the furious of the wave against the rock-clifves of Marechiaro. Then I have understood...”

Apparition, 2006 - Mixed technique on canvas - cm 100x150 - Vision Center-Cork collection

And must not have been easy, in the confused climate of the informal, under the suggestion of Biasi group and friends (all more or less related to the Nuclear Movement, but already hearing toward a research objective) and falling in love to an artist of stature of Armando de Stefano who, precisely at the end of the years ' 50, departs from realistic vein and the painting as a kind of tale to rather close to the research material and Abstract Expressionism. And then there is no less restless Night of his pupils and then excited Paladin of Picasso.

Does Borrello feel not to have anchorages anymore, and he annotates lost: "But the museums, the teaching of masters, the tradition of our painting, does everything this still serve? It seems to me to live an adventure."

It is also right the figuration which despite everything he has never abjured, it is not anymore of the years of Academy. Under the push of De Stefano, Ferrosi, Cremonini, Zigaina and Vespignani the relationship image, the space, nearly firm to the Renaissance canons, it is distorted. The traditional plant jumps; the footlights disappear, the perspectives, the escapes. The space doesn't have confinements anymore: it opens and produces new spaces, which it turns to them they Cross and intersect him, while the game of the plans creates other deceptive spaces, in a mechanics that alters times and images and that it often ends up stirring out some reality.

It derives a representation of the unexpected and ambiguous image of it, such to allow a reading more faces than the work. We are still to a network of experiences partly to verify, which a new way is not extraneous to intend the Surrealism, more abstract opening itself to the daily paper feeds as the endless stimulations that reality can suggest.

And the reality of Borrello remains the sea. But no longer between the waves took momentum and form his adolescence. Boundaries and characters of the body of water belong to amarcord, the passage is always less than parthenopean connotations.

Then also these last survivals disappear for leaving the place to an expanse of water without confinements and to the incessant motion of the wave, that produces and winds ambiguous figures: nymphs, naiadi, swimmers without time.

"I did the painter because it is an adventure. And I want to live it down. " I think Dominique Fernandez who has identified the distinctiveness of Neapolitan in this extraordinary willingness to adventure, perhaps just for the components of risk, uncertainty and unpredictability that it entails.

So even when Borrello changes the attitude and he has involved from new experiences, it is always the charm of the adventure to entangle him. It will be so in the frequent scorribandes for Europe of the north, the avid eyes to the teachers of the expressionism; so during the long stay in the Michigan; and still in California, lucky winner of the selections of the Rembrandt Project.

The typical of the artist which references Solmi I don't think it is no stranger to this melting pot of encounters and feelings, which are oddly to build on an already upset by contrasting experiences.

This explains how the initial tendency to story and painting pretty descriptive can apparently dissolve in the light of the teaching at night and under the blows of Biasi and companions, and then resurface unpredictable (and of course with other results) after the discovery of the Expressionists.

It comes to handed a bond - of certain few legible in his tormented and ambiguous Stratifications - between a mediterranean of sensual and bossy origin and the intense suggestions of the northern art, made more complicated by the restlessness of the artist, always tried by every possible anarchy, also inside the proper one I believe.

Laminar flow, 2006 - Mixed technique on canvas - cm 100x80 - Municipality Cork

The simplifications appear unnecessary, especially if we take into account every possible reference to Ensor, Kirchner, Klimt, comes more from the craftiness and observer is not safe from spies, although it is undeniable that in the sunshine of Borrello, in his white calcined in fullness of light that invades his canvases you experience something different and more intriguing than a simple and sober.

And Francesco Butturini, for years close to search Borrello, did not fail to grasp these geographical before concords, recognizing at the same time the full autonomy of the artist and the maturity of the results obtained. But, perhaps, beyond the extraordinary colours to broad bays and that light, that is for sure the magical component of his canvases, is the sign to characterize, at first sight, the painting of Pippo Borrello.

A sign that preserves intact and secure its classical matrix, and proceeds in a log bed very controlled, though in appearance – but only in appearance – gets rid of any original packaging for unravelling, imaginative and rebellious, tormented and Pindaric beyond initial project. -

And it is here that the lesson expressionistic (and compositional level tangencies bring me more to the cinema that painting), and the dreamlike surrealism echoes more discovered: sensual sign wraps, intertwines overlaps, runs free on the canvas to spiral up and never stop, takes shape, image, from which you generate other images.

An iconic sign, which follows trends in taste fleury (without trace out the same original solutions where the eye enchants to chase familial forms which have vagueness of myth.

And in the myth, which feeds the mind, metaphysics of the so-called newspaper goes tried the search value of Borrello, unlabeled painter.