ROBERTO ALTMANN

Infinite Forms
 

Critical text by Gregorio Fornaciai

 

Roberto Altmann paints with the body and on the body.
He moves through it, listens to it, breaks it down. In his paintings, the body is not a figure to be represented, but a living, mutable material, constructed and dismantled under the weight of color.

The Infinite Forms that give the exhibition its title are not variations on a theme, but attempts, openings, trajectories. Each work is a fragment of an ongoing transformation. The pictorial gesture, often rapid, incisive, physical, does not seek definition, but presence. And this presence is never clear: it can be glimpsed through layers of paint, emerging and then falling back into chaos.

Altmann works against smoothness: his painting is rough, layered, dense. The brush cuts, scratches, caresses.
The canvases seem to breathe, as if they held movement, memory, an impulse.

In an era that consumes images at lightning speed, Altmann slows down. He returns to painting as a space of contact, conflict, and resistance. Each work is an open question, a body in waiting, a shifting boundary.
There is no definitive answer, only forms that continue to change.

If the human figure is the starting point, it is never a subject to be depicted, but a tension to be passed through. As Altmann himself states, this exhibition is the final stage of a long exploration of form and image: "not a constant, but a continuous drift."
The figure loses its representational function and transforms as a field of energy, emotion, thought.
There is no message to convey, but rather a disorientation to experience.

Altmann belongs to that lineage of painters for whom the image is always something to question. In his practice, there is no truth to affirm, but a tension to keep alive: between what appears and what lies beneath, between tradition and its constant undoing. As art critic Luciano Caprile writes, his painting does not deliver direct messages, but conveys the bewilderment of the present, suspended between memory and instability.

Even on a technical level, Altmann experiments: some works incorporate collage not as decoration, but as correction, as wound or interruption. These are layers, inserts, fragments that break the surface to make it more alive, more uncertain.
Ultimately, what interests the artist is not the finished image, but everything that moves within and around it:
"a painting in search, always in search of something else."