Manifesto
Fluid Momentism
Fluid Momentism is an art current that refuses the fixed to embrace change. It is based on the assumption that the form of thoughts is, by nature, fluid and changeable.
The works do not represent a single thought but are the expression of a movement.
Each painting immortalizes the moment in which a flow of thoughts in motion changes what we perceive of the world. The geometric order of things that appears to us as solid is constantly twisted and made fluid by the never-ending current of our mind.
Each work, therefore, is not a photograph but the record of a change, the sum of a flow of thoughts that compose our real inner world.
Biography
Massimo Castronuovo
His sense of art is due to some difficult period that brought him to voice his ideas. Self-taught artist, he followed his passion as an instinct, without artistic rules but using the materials that satisfied his needs. His origins are the reason of his love for the South of Italy and it produces a contradictory sense of love and hate for the industrial town where he lives. This is the main contrast that brings him to an interior conflict and it caused his inspiration energy. His style, original and personal, represents with his waves the emotions he feels in every single moment of his work. His inspiration come from some kind of incomprehension, where the reason is a victim of the events and the result is a sum of thoughts that shape in waves. These waves remember the female curves that appear with obsession and tangle, producing a sensual and harmonious balance. His works show a need of expression: the big surfaces want to represent the big thoughts coming from the reality, where everything is changeable and victim of the time.
Practice
Artistic personality
Castronuovo’s work is out of every possible classification but it shows an unusual brightness and balance. It is neither abstract nor figurative painting but rather direct expression of the soul. In 1992/93 he started to experiment and to combine the different artistic techniques that brought him to his personal painting universe. Looking at daily life, Massimo Castronuovo is the regulator of his own world that he represents with a thick interlace of lines, creating black and white spaces. The opposition between black and white, symbol of the eternal contrast between matter and energy, is very important in his painting: the energy, using the white colours, is translated into light and plasma, in free shape compositions never left to chance. Light is the essential value that shows Castronuovo’s search for depth and his passion for sculpture. Regarding his technique, recent works are rich in new colours, coming from experimentation with different materials such as acrylic, colouring matter, oil, charcoal pencil and coloured crayon. In his artistic search, Castronuovo carefully selects materials, often represented by esteemed cotton paper. Recently, he produced large paintings and, in private locations, some murals.
Critical text
Forms and colours in pictorial dynamism
One can not be indifferent about the originality of expression of contemporary painting. Warhol, inventor of Pop Art, Pollock, master of abstract expressionism, Francesco Clemente and others are the protagonists of the Transavanguardia and new pictorial routes. Massimo Castronuovo, a young painter from Turin, gave an answer with an original “Free Dynamic Expressionism”, building momentum with a colour painting that is gaining support from art professionals.
His pictorial genius points to the creation of works that highlight the free form, in the magical splendour of colours; an élan vital, the colour-soul development of the sign, which recalls feeling, reason, insight and creativity. Geometric and informal developments recompose themselves into beautiful three-dimensional draperies, wonderfully articulated through light and shadow.
I recall the admonition of Vasari: “The union of painting is a divergence of different colours brought together.” The artist’s aesthetic feelings are translated into vibrations of light and warm, living inventiveness. Art critics say that Castronuovo’s paintings reveal an exuberant pictorial spontaneity, far from neo-figurative art and reminiscent of the abstraction of Kandinsky and Delaunay. A brilliant narrative space becomes an attractive artistic reality; the images are evocative and lively within fluid drapery that seems to move in an engaging dynamism.
Francesco Esposito · Art critic
