To use the term painting today, as a title or the theme of an exhibition, must, I think, sound like an enormous provocation. The word painting today seems to imply on principle something that is anachronistic, old-fashioned, forgotten. Both because there has been a complete rejection of it by the predominant styles of painting, and because our art, in general, behind it has decades and decades of works and currents which have historically, and in various ways, paved the way for this anachronism. So it must be said that the conformism of the contemporary art scene is the same as we find in any other field of human production. Is this the death of painting? Not in the least.
There are still works, in Italy and abroad, that attempt to refer, if only timidly, to notions that in my view coincide very closely with the issue of painting as style, as art and as technique, specifically. It may seem absurd on my part to dedicate a series of works to painting, almost as if it were an important personage, the maestro, or the perfect model, but that's what it is! I consider producing painting an exercise of absolute rigour, not imagination, as the commonplace of creating art would have us believe. It is a question of rigour, and also of madness, but not to be presumed to be representable and not to be confused with spontaneity and freedom. Rigour imposes emulation of nature, artificial nature, nature inherent in the artifice that each artist struggles to produce on his canvas and sheet.

I say emulation because I consider it an ancient method that is still valid today. Emulation of nature, not so as to imitate it, but to re-invent it. This re-invention is not possible through the emulation, but through imitation: exactly the way the Ancients did it. That way, following this long path, we arrive at the discovery that nature is artificial, all the same. Artifice of nature, artifice of painting, artificial life.

The modern work is written and painted along the tradition, it could not be otherwise. Anyone who claims the contrary does not know what he is doing; whoever thinks that he can make an artistic gesture to break with those who have gone before, with the past, to challenge his precursors or to conduct revivals or create the ready-made, is wrong. What is new is not a ready-made or the dejà vue. Nothing can be already-made, but not freely, rather always beginning from tradition, which can never be cancelled. Along this path, ancient art finds itself in the invisible layer of each abstract and modern work that considers this notion. For this reason 19th-century philosophical aestheticism did not manage to become deleterious in time for the painters of the age, as it did for those of the 20th century. An aesthetics based on subjectivism and absolute freedom for the artist to do the first thing that passed through his head, and which could obviously only lead to the nihilism and iconoclasm that reign supreme today. Abstract art, to be really modern, does not need to be conceptual, it needn't be utopian, it needn't be revivalist, but should do what the ancients did, imitate one another through the heredity left us by civilisation and works of art, without doing away with abstraction. Finding ourselves today in a museum in front of a declaredly abstract work, perhaps by a young painter, we must finally be able to exclaim: "Yes, this is a work that hasn't forgotten the teaching of Leonardo da Vinci!"

Today what I call digital painting has stolen the show. It may be a contradiction in terms: even technique is a contradictory term, but it is a contradiction that we can keep for our purposes here. Even if it is a new technique, I think that it will become more and more important, a bit like what happened during the Industrial Revolution with the first large-scale production of pigments. In fact the digital involves not only the production of visual arts, in the narrow sense, but all art typologies, including the multi-medial in each field of application, and hence not only artistic but also political, commercial, ethical, in short, cultural. As it is still a new technique, it attracts a considerable amount of debate around it, especially as it is also linked to the issue of communication, triggered off by the Internet. The link between art and communication is now closer and more interesting. Communication forces its way into the structure of a work of art, into its politics, its philosophy.
All scientific, ethical, organisational, taboo issues that the digital raises have not been so far cleared up and articulated because we need more time, and so they are always at the centre of interesting and lively debate. What is interesting in the sphere of digital painting is also the importance of the new production mode which can arise for each artist. We also know that with the digital, the ethical issue presents itself differently. For example, we no longer have an original work and its copy, but each file, each image, is a copy, or, if you like, an original. If we wanted to, we could have many copies and many originals; is that the same thing? It's up to the artist to decide if he wants to produce works in series or a single work, even though, with this new utensil, everyone knows that the notion of redundance has been introduced, that is, the possibility of having an unlimited number of clones for a document, an image or a file.
Is there talk of works created with a plotter? Certainly there is, but they can also be "mixed" works, that is, made with a "mixage" technique. Once we've done this, we also have to realise that the work can be exhibited physically in a gallery, or virtually, again in an art gallery or atelier, by means of projections of different kinds and importance, or on line, in a virtual gallery. This is the absolute and interesting novelty that the term "virtual" does not, at this early date, define sufficiently, I think. What we are dealing with is still various ways of hanging and exhibiting a work, its distribution, as well as the work that becomes itself the producer of references to other images and other productions. In my works I attempt to understand the properties and qualities of the work through this technique, concentrating above all on uniqueness, the unicum. I try to always find the specificity in the instant in which something is produced with that particular utensil.
Whatever utensil is used, it is important to know that there is this specificity that belongs to it. It is obvious that you have to precede the question of the utensil by that of the painting, and that's no accident. We know that digital painting has a strong debt in its writing to classicism. The artist therefore has to make use of the electronic utensil, the graphic board, software, without forgetting this debt to painting and writing. Starting from here he can also dare new things and innovate. But without jumping and ignoring tradition and what came before him. Even if this very modern utensil is able to supply important stylistic suggestions and innovations, we have to keep this important rule before us. The utensil is not an end in itself, we must never stop at technicism but go beyond the utensil, and then take a further step and even go beyond the role of the artist himself.
Web art is an example of this. In the exhibition organised in July 2000, with the participation of European and American artists that work with the Web, I noticed this very link with "something there was before". I refer in particular to the visual poetry of the sixties and seventies, which we have seen recently in the work of the artist and writer Vincenzo Accame, who died recently. Visual poetry seems to have been created especially for the Web, for the Internet, both in its layout and graphics and in the artistic and cultural aspect. But this is something that will have to be dealt with in more detail another time.