An Inquiry into the Good (n.1) Painting

An Inquiry into the Good is an artwork composed by a series of 25 paintings. This is Inquiry n. 1. The title was inspired by the book (with the same title) written by Japanese philosopher Kitaro Nishida. In my work, I tried to translate Nishida's concept of a 'pure experience' through painting, investigating the pure experience of the subject-object relation, and everything that happens between them. The human figures depicted in the painting are a pretext to take the viewer's gaze into the in-between space of this relation, a space populated by forces more than by people. In order to make all these forces become visible, I tried to carefully use the accidental elements emerging during the phase of chromatic preparation, following them with clear-cut brush strokes that captured the bodies while making them flow into the pictorial space. The choice of acrylic as a technique was dictated by the necessity to use a medium that could be almost instantaneous in its application and that could be worked by successive 'strata' after its drying, in a way that allowed the previous phases to be preserved and influence the following ones. The expressionist style of the painting is a direct consequence of this technique.