A summer in Camerino

In one of the last Biennal exhibitions of art in Venice, in 1986, was a session on the relationship between art and biology. I remember I 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 of the forecast of planets or stars discovered on the base of pure mathematical calculations. A theme today of great actuality in relationship to 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 office, 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 tense conference to deepen that "world" that, 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 it and therefore also "to repair" formality of wrong pathological communication.

If to Biennal of Venice were combined scientific materials and works of art, at Camerino they will put on together the pictures of Borrello, to chemists’, neuroscientists’ and pharmacologists’ searches extensively documented by 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 have looked at the works of Borrello. I have admired it, 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. What 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 Miniscalchi Foundation on the theme "painting and sport", when they were about to open the Olympiads.

It is as if he were stimulated by social events and their main protagonists: the heroes of our time. There is no doubt that Borrello lives of heroes. In these works, the hero becomes the scientist, the researcher, which bind discoveries that know give still life while death tries to delete it. Once were gods to play about life and death now Borrello seems to say “are scientists”. Perhaps note that with the introduction of antibiotics, in a few decades, average age went from 47 to 80 years. A life given by Pharmacological Sciences. And you will understand, therefore, why these works are moving in Rambo invisible mounting receptors, activating nerve fibers, so keeping alive a body that otherwise it would turn.

Dance, 2006 - Mixed technique on canvas - cm 100x150 - Private collection Pavia

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 him into a thalamus: places that have to whether to do with the life. I don't know the personality of Borrello. His internal, but certain world he gives the impression to hold inside of itself a great child, perhaps some capricious, certainly able also to try charm of forehead to every aspect of the life, as if it 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 convention.

This way he can clone the same Camerino, as if it were a cell that multiplies him in so many Camerinos, all equal ones and naturally all extraordinary ones. Every child, is known is afraid: it is another impression that is gotten being next to this painter that for his bodily dimensions he could be a Dioscuro. It doesn't frighten, but it is full of fear, perhaps he dreams to become a hero. They are nine the works that he has prepared for this occasion.
With the alone 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. There are three colors that stand out in the Borrello palette: white, gold and silver. I know nothing of painting technique, but there is no doubt that the white and gold are the colors of mystery and Holy. The sacred in the manner intended by Rudolf Otto, as fascination and fear.
On the gold the man goes crazy for centuries: seeking the formula that did it derive from the stone.

You should carefully look at these pictorial medallions in the signs as you discover more wavy shapes that at first sight not included; We need all the attention of a researcher and then there are the faces, bodies, creating symbols and metaphors. As if the newspaper and trivial they were full of secrets and mystery. As the shadow of the man, who always follows him, although sometimes you don't see. The shadow is the metaphor of life, because without a shadow does not exist; but also of death which is disembodied shade.

After these considerations that they drag on the charm of words and their evocative capacity, seems to say that the initiative of the University of Camerino mix art, maximum expression of freedom, with science, strong example of rigour, is very effective.

Certainly offers the old question of the contraries, which many have appeared identical. Who knows if the scientific discovery were art and the culture of Borrello a spiteful search inside his laboratory in Pigna Street, number one.