The one-man show which the painter is organising for this autumn-cum-winter of 2003 at the Galerie Krisal in Geneva, a coherent collection of recent works, confirms how a-typical a course it is which renders Giancarlo Moro a “stranger in his own land”, notwithstanding the fact that his research appears sound and mature, that his painting has been adjudged by the critic Walter Schönenberger “qualitatively high, morally exacting”.
If one draws attention to the eccentricity – albeit sober, aristocratic even – that characterises Giancarlo Moro’s artistic being, it is because at bottom it helps to explain his work, is intimately connected with its character. For this work finds its poetic dimension in remoteness, and its fundamental coordinates in eccentricity or perspective mutability, which serve as a constructive element, structure proper.
Child of the figurative culture of abstract expressionism in its more lyrical manifestations, Giancarlo Moro wished to submit his creative and expressive imagination to the strict rules abstraction, to the point of adopting minimalist-type methods. This need of his to set himself a limit, to control feeling through reason, was dictated to him – as already pointed out by Schönenberger – by a moral imperative according to which order represents a quality which reverberates outward from the aesthetic field into the sphere of life itself (and the life social).
Order, balance, silence – these make up the framework of Giancarlo Moro’s paintings, designed for meditation. The zone they delimit grants the painter only the tiniest room for manoeuvre, requiring of him an extreme inventive subtlety, matched only by the refinement with which he handles areas of colour. These are surfaces whose intensity is increased by inner vibrations, the result of long elaboration and ceaseless mental speculation. In Giancarlo Moro’s compositions, multiple surfaces – or spaces – usually join together to attain a harmonious balance, at times slightly troubled (but then how pregnant the effect of the gap that creeps in!); the gaze is invited to flow in a precise direction and to pass without pause from a microscopic view to a panoramic. Ranging through those potentially infinite expanses which open up within the “rooms” Giancarlo Moro discloses, the eye finds almost secret handholds that lead the vision back to a well-nigh discursive plan in the great resolving riverbed of nature.
The depths of the absolute which Giancarlo Moro’s paintings tend towards, and reach, exact from the painter ever-new goals, powerful challenges played with and resolved in the unspoilt intimacy of an inner dialogue progressively captured by the fascination of maximum reduction – Absolument rien, absolument tout is the title, emblematic of a whole philosophy, which the artist has given to one of his works this year. But in that dialogue there remains, suspended in the gesture, the ultimate, definitive movement. After which, however, will come countless others.