“(…) We should then say that black, as the non-colour of painting, is not the opposite of light, but the support of a light other than light (…)” Alain Badiou, Lo splendore del nero, Edizioni Ponte alle Grazie

In a temporal evolution of artistic expressions, photography fixed more precisely what drawing had approached by successive moments of definition. At least in its original intentions, photography was reality, while drawing was its approximation.
Pino Guidolotti took that path in reverse, moving from photography to drawing. Of course, he continues to walk around with a little camera in his pocket, ready to fix faces and moments that catch his eye, but they almost never become photographic prints, rather he uses them to help his memory guide his hand and his fat, black pencils. Colours are almost banned from his drawings: there is the white of the paper and the black of the drawing. Sometimes even grey, but in the end, it only serves to further emphasise the strength of those blacks that seem wanting to devour the entire surface available.
The reason for these choices can perhaps be seen in the artistic and human “exile” to which Pino has subjected himself in recent years. Photography, the real photography of which Guidolotti had been one of the most sensitive and acute masters, has lost its role and necessity: it has become pure advertising propaganda, pure marketing, eating away those spaces of freedom that were indispensable to Pino, as to true artists. Drawing, freed from any commission other than his own inspiration and passion, gave him back some of the independence that the photography market had cancelled.

In the silence – at least in the mediatic sphere – of “his” Salento, his creative freedom has found the inspiration to express itself, the way to communicate. Once again it is his love and curiosity for people that has guided his photographic eye for years and that here finds a new expressiveness.
If we look at the drawings on display here at Assab One, a selection of his production, we cannot avoid noticing the rigour of the proportions, the compositional elegance, the balance of solids and voids – one would say, better, of blacks and whites – on which his pictorial inventions take shape. The photographer’s eye, trained in proportion and balance, is still wide open. It is there to impose its golden laws. This can be seen in the still lifes where the play of perspective guides the draughtsman’s hand. But then it is the strength of black, “the colour of the soul” as Alain Badiou writes, who is ready to tell us what Pino feels and what drove him towards this path that takes over.
His is an existential choice before being an artistic one. It stands out in those faceless figures that move in some of the drawings, in those human silhouettes that seem to want to break the balance of the setting: a table, a window, a wall are as if they are disfigured by the presences of men without identity, black ghosts of a world that has lost recognisability. It is as if Pino wanted to tell us that something has been lost forever, the bar, the house, the street where his characters move have lost all identity, they are the non-places of a world that is both distant and near: they are mysterious and indistinct but also because they are disturbing and obsessive.

Installed one next to the other as an ideal tape that binds them together in a visual and sentimental journey, Pino Guidolotti’s drawings are a way of telling us about his struggles and his efforts to overcome them and give strength to the need to find a voice that can be heard. This is why one never remains indifferent in front of these works, one does not pass them by as one sometimes does in front of certain purely illustrative paintings, interested perhaps only in the technique employed. Even if they are just “simple” plants – which are not simple after all, with their indistinct identity – we feel that the artist wanted to convey a sense of his own dissatisfaction, of his intolerance for a world that at times seems like a cage capable of imprisoning you without you realising it, and that only the harrowing power of black can remind us of and convey to us.

Paolo Mereghetti