One day I’ll find a word
that will reach into your belly and make it fruitful,
a word that will linger on your breast
like a hand at once open and clenched.
I’ll discover a word
that will grasp your body and make it spin
that will contain your body
and open your eyes like unclouded gods
and wear your saliva
and spread your legs wide.
Perhaps you won’t hear it
or understand it.
There’s no need for that.
It will go through your insides like a wheel
traversing you at last
from head to toe,
you who are mine and not mine,
and won’t stop, even if you die.
(Roberto Juarroz)

Everything, inside me, turns dizzily. Boxes and mind.
(Gaetano Arcangeli)

Vortex is a meeting with word which turns into matter. A cosmopoetic constitution is the pursuit which leads the artist Opiemme to this three shows' cycle. The first one took place at BI-BOx Art Space in Biella, the second has occurred recently in Bologna at Portanova12 Gallery, the third will take place next November at Studio D'Ars in Milan.

Vortex investigates the cyclical osmosis between human and the cosmos, by questioning with words, poems, planets and stars. The painting becomes breath and light.

The work draws inspiration from the book L'alfabeto scende dalle stelle: sull'origine della scrittura (The Alphabet falls from the stars: on the origin of writing) is a book by Giuseppe Sermonti where he states that the alphabet is an image of the constellations. Thus, the language turns into a fluctuating projection of the universe. How much dizziness and vastness around this thought...

Letters as petals of dandelions whirls from the painting on the wall on the top of the bus station of Bologna: N, S, Y, F, i, H, M, etc...

The series of these artworks are the result of the feelings of the artist and his poetry, conducted during the last two years throughout Italy, thanks to a project entitled Un viaggio di pittura e poesia (A Journey through painting and poetry) and throughout the entire world, in places such as Haiti, Thailand, Uruguay and Argentina (where he took part at the 5a Bienal del fin del mundo and, lastly, in Poland, where, in my opinion, Opiemme has given shape to the essence of Vortex, thanks to a 10th floor wall painting for the Monumental Art event in Gdansk, a tribute to the poetress Wislawa Szymborska, who won the Nobel Prize in 1996, a woman that turned poetry into acute and shiny feelings: (The quote is) From Under a certain little star:
“… Truth, do not pay me too much attention. Solemnity, be magnanimous toward me … ”.

Letters fluctuate as colorful elements, falling from a black giant black-hole. Endless poetry merges with the dark mystery of the cosmos. A deep introspection generates the abyss of the word while a rainbow casts fragments of languages into geometrical colors.

Everything in Opiemme's works is balanced by conflicting forces. In his curatorial text Daniele Decia describes Vortex as a pursuit between the Abstractism and the Word, in both dichotomic and calibrated ways. It appears to be a pursuit of "informal letters" and visual poetry. I would add that it is a cameo of generative and fertile letters, which give birth to instantaneous ones, merged with atoms.

In the show of Bologna, it is possible to appreciate this dualism between the techniques of stencil and dripping, the first more uniform than the colorful, multiform and changeable ways of the latter. The British astrophysicist Martin Rees wrote: "The sun and the firmament are part of our environment - that is our cosmic habitat; this is a perception which scientists share with poets and mystics". "I am part of the sun, mycosis of my eye is part of me" - wrote D. H.Lawrence and Van Gogh has painted The Starry Night with the same spirit with which he painted cornfields and sunflowers. There are a lot of similar examples in arts and literature of this.

Science makes this sense of infinity even deeper. Humankind is halfway between the universe and the microcosm: as many human bodies as the number of atoms that constitute ourselves are needed to make the mass of the sun. Our existence depends on the nature of the atoms to attach to each other unifying into complicated molecules which form every living tissue. However, the oxygen and carbon of our bodies was created by the farther stars, which lived and then dead million of years ago. These planets tattooed with letters and words have become real intergalactic skins.

“The poet of street art”, as he is known, has used fierce and historical pens, like Gaetano Angeli, Roberto Roversi, Lucio Dalla, Edgar Allan Poe and Eugenio Montale. In my opinion he transformed verses into opalescent letters which are evanescent and foggy matter, not only images. Words are deconstructed in order to fall into a gassy, free and chaotic state.

I found perfect supports of poetic powder the geographic maps and some old pages of the Italian newspaper Il Resto del Carlino; in these works, letters and planets are more incisive and independent, even though they preserve their own autonomy. They are able to interact without interfering with their underlying realities.

The spaces are milky drippings who give a complete perception to the milky consistency, which is endless and point-shaped. Galaxies of words intersect one another like meteorological precipitations on layers of memory, news and places, geographies which have become horizons in the mind of the observer.

The painting style of Opiemme is centripetal and natural, he wants to come back to the origin, by leading us to the chaos,to the organic chiasmus of the matter. In his ancestral constitution, he is able to unify micro and macro with visual balance. In the silence of the universe his work is onomatopoeic and grandiose. His works are appeals, in the urgency and brevity of a nocturnal verse that turns into a lightning full of vision and memory.

Everything is ready: the luggage,
the shirts, the maps, the vacuous hope.
/
I dust my eyelids
I put on my eyelet
the wind rose.
/
Everything is ready: the sea, the atlas, the air.
/
I only need the When, the Where
the logbook, the cards,
the courage and someone who loves me,
as I am not able to love me.
/
The boat is not here, the astonished hands,
the concentrated look, the ambushes,
the umbilical line of the horizon
which underlines these suspended verses...
/
Everything is ready. For sure. In vain.
(Juan Vicente Piqueras, Desire to stay)