Calvino -

"In the current atmosphere, with diluted genres absorbed by the seemingly endless shadow of Duchamp and rife with the objects and power of media and new technology, to be able to breathe in the old tradition of painting is at the very least an act of rebellion. It is also a tribute to the democracy of the classic; in other words, a tribute to those things that last through time and bring us pleasure.

Calvino’s paintings should be analyzed in this context. In an apparent evocation of the now distant graffiti of Basquiat, his narrative pays tribute to a hermeneutics that is decipherable through the references he admires: refining on Dubuffet and the most recent heritage of the post-formalist abstraction that reacted to Greenberg’s Formalism.

His paintings reveal evidence of past experiences that define subtle text and light iconography within thick brushstrokes of warm colour as well as vacuous emulsive areas that must be interpreted emotionally.

Combining recognizable techniques Calvino nevertheless tries to define his pictorial space – as a hidden secretion of life or an event that is reflected despite ourselves – like a musical score, sequencing the rhythmic value of the composition when confronting the randomness of his ...