Pietro Disegna’s creative ethics
by Riccardo Triolo

Pietro Disegna is a polyhedral artist whose aesthetic choices correspond precisely and significantly with the events of his life.
I have known him for many years and have witnessed the decisions he has made that have led him, progressively and decisively, to dedicate his body and soul to art and abandon all other means of subsistence that are not connected with creativity and the transmission of his knowledge.
Over time, and thanks to his art, it appears to me that Pietro has changed deeply over the years; his joyous temperament has calmed down, his creative intelligence has been instilled in his increasingly moderate, intense gestures. It seems that an era has passed since the immediacy and aggressiveness of his shrill and aesthetic acrylics of the 90’s. As well as since those times of simple fun, amusing jokes and nonsense that animated the evenings we spent together with our friends.
Today, Pietro Disegna appears seraphic, detached yet bitterly critical of today’s reality. Among the hallways and large empty spaces of his home-studio, filled with strewn objects that allude to and feign a desire to return to simplicity, if not sobriety (recycled furnishings, raw material), the air you breathe only appears calm.
Instead, you are caught unaware by the signs of his existential restlessness, by his thirst for answers that translate into the inquisitive presence of a swing anchored to the ceiling of the loft, into the allusiveness of a large monitor placed on a table near the well-lit entrance, into the elegant and fairy-tale like glimmer of his white paper lamps that brighten up glimpses of a everyday reality left suspended, into the vividness of a series of unresolved forms that indicate just as many queries of form (sculptures, parts of works), into the rereading of feng – shui.
The polyhedral and fragmentary nature of Disegna’s artistic journey is evident here in its paradoxical organicity. Today, the artist’s path is organic, as organicity and union, dictated by the philosophic principles of awareness and harmony beloved by the mystic Armenian Georges Ivanovič Gurdjieff to whom he alludes directly and indirectly in many of his works, are the points towards which Pietro Disegna’s human existence is always and continuously inclined.
His criticism is artistic and therefore pragmatic with regard to the blindness and vanity of today’s world and is not far removed from ecological practices in a broad sense (ecology of thought as environment and environment as thought) that unify movements and communities that, on a transnational level, are urgently reinstating ethics at the center of human behavior. Therefore, creative ethics is the hub of Pietro Disegna’s most recent artistic production: paintings, sculptures, objects and ideas of biodesign, formative and educational projects that appear to search for, demand and finally promote a concept of human existence that is as organic as possible.

Egg tempera: ethics and aesthetics of organicity
In his recovery of the antique egg tempera technique, taken from historic manuals, which he experimented and perfected during long and determined sessions of study and application, Pietro Disegna’s creative ethics are clearly apparent.
The patience that this technique requires, from the careful search for natural pigments originally used in preparing tempera, from the quick and precise application of the color to the slow and meticulous control of the strokes to achieve the effects of chiaroscuro, constrains the artist to concentrate on the selection and significance of the painted subject, on the exactness of his color selections and finally on the awareness of the pictorial gesture, with the result that the painter himself assimilates his creation. In these works, which he created between 2006 and 2008, Disegna successfully expresses the organicity that represents the basis of his biographical and artistic choices.
The painter and his painting are inseparable. The meaning of the work seems then only to be completed in their union, in the flow from the artist himself into his pictorial gesture and finally in the glimmer that surprises the viewer when in contact with this mysterious human precipitate. The viewer is forced however to approach the artist in order to grasp the meanings that underlie his selections of form: a theory (again Gurdjieff, but also the Hebrew Cabala and tarots), a concept, an allegory. Disegna completes the meaning of his paintings and rarely permits the viewer to freely travel in his world. Instead, the viewer is forced to answer the question of its meaning and is assimilated into the organic vision that these paintings demand.
In Settima dominante (egg tempera on wood, cm 103.5x91), a large tree hides and also reveals the most attractive chord in everyone, which seems here to resonate in an urgent request for homogeneity and harmony with the universe it represents.
In Gurdjieff (egg tempera on wood, cm 103.5x91) the viewer is explicitly involved, in a negative manner, apparently requested to observe, watch and question the chromatic surfaces and forms, in the image of the blindfolded face. Also in Wind (egg tempera on wood, cm 54x101) the frontality of the faces asks the viewer to stand in front of the painting as if he were standing in front of himself; imploring the disunion, the dissonance, the fission of himself, making sense of his multiplicity.

Vanity and structure:
The series exhibited in the recent show titled Vanity and structure (Vanità e struttura, September 20 – October 5 2008, Palazzo La Loggia, Motta di Livenza) marks a turn in Disegna’s poetics.
Just as impulsive and sanguine as his first acrylics, but more dramatically restless, the large panels in this series were created with a technique that had not yet been used by the artist. The pure pigment painted directly on the surface (also wood) is distributed in progressive layers with a glossy paint.
The glossy, repelling effect is a clashing union of colors, in which the cold tones dominate, contrasted by sprays and spurts of vivid and intense color (Vanity and structure 3).
An impasto made homogenous by the glossy surface, which seems to shield the pictorial material and, like a mirror, reflect the viewer up to the point of making him imagine reflective surfaces stretching out towards the epidermic vanity of the world, against a structure that emerges, from the background, emphasizing its role as a framework of man’s relationship with himself and with others.
The graphic stroke, intentionally childish (Vanity and structure 18) or aesthetic (Vanity and structure 10), is the bearer of structure, whereas the chromatic impasto is instead the sign of vanity, of superficiality and of the emotive ephemeral that attracts and repulses, disuniting us once again (Vanity and structure 22).