«Latitude 34/40» is a confrontation between seven Italian artists and five American ones, in a fascinating exhibition which exposes the public to emotional surges and pauses of reflection, leaps of imagination and sudden recalls to reality. Figurative, informal, conceptual and minimal artists share what John Dewey called “the common substance of the arts”, or in other words the sensibility for one’s own means of expression, in which the artists emphatically projects his or her feelings or emotions. The artists selected by Lydia Takeshita and Cynthia Penna are: Abbamondi, Arciprete, Baricchi, Borrelli, Ciannella, Pastore and Morante as representatives of Italy; Aber, Gooding, Greenfield, Marcucci and Razili as representatives of the United States.

Marco Abbamondi uses pliant materials as cork to express, through growing lines which seem to echo in space, the sense of a magmatic fluidity and a preference for three-dimensional effects. His reliefs aspire to occupy space, to conquer it with the solidity of a construction and the sinuosity of a climbing ivy.

The poetic compositions of Caterina Arciprete center on symbolic elements that evoke the sphere of love and maternity: an eye which observes and watches, a feather which lets itself be cradled by the wind, pieces of a heart which glide on a surface, entering into the cracks. A female sensibility is expressed in the delicacy of the colors and the lightness of the sign, gentle and sinuous like the neck of a swan.

Mirko Baricchi, mindful of the lesson of the surrealists and that of Freudian psychoanalysis, has chosen the unconscious as his field of artistic investigation and research. He associates apparently unconnected figures and objects in his painting, making them navigate freely in the abysses of memory. His figures are often associated with a mask, understood not as an instrumental object but as a way to be, which also assumes a noetic valence, of intuitive and immediate knowledge of the ‘hidden’ levels of reality.

Fabio Borrelli presents a number of paintings in black and white on the subject of a childhood which seems to have lost its natural aspirations due to short-sighted politics unable to look ahead and plan the future. In Borrelli’s paintings, in fact, the ‘emptied’ outlines of the children become icons of contemporary reality in a solitary recital, which seeks an impossible bath in dark, alienating surroundings, without possibility to escape.

Stefano Ciannella prefers the photographic negative, where the object loses its material substance to be poetically dissolved in the void, both due to the transparency of the plate and to the luminous reflections of the glass protecting it. His photographs tend to cross the border into metaphysics, into the fogs of a dreamy imagery, repudiating that role of exact and faithful documentation of reality which one usually attributes to the photographic means.

Daniela Morante visualizes her interior path in an energetic circuit, which carries with it flower petals, fragments of life that have been uprooted and carried away in a sensual vortex. The informal layering of watercolor suggests a feeling of fragile precariousness, offset by the phytomorphic elements painstakingly outlined in china ink.

Gloria Pastore focuses her research on the theme of identity, on the indefinite relationship between the I and the other, the unit and the multiplicity, which creates a dimension of disorientation accentuated by the incessant proliferation of images, typical of the contemporary reality. The human body is therefore no longer the concrete and universal manifestation of the I, but tends to become a vacuous image, inserted in a complex play of references and evocations. However, the dimension of disorientation represents the essential condition for planning a new state of being.

Ann Gooding navigates with originality and character in the never fully explored territory of abstraction. Her paintings feature two superimposed layers which interact on a semantic level. The inferior layer is occupied by fluctuating forms of memory, phantasms capable of evoking persons and past experiences, while the upper layer is a thin, opaque membrane which conceals and at the same time makes you want to look beyond, to discover unexpected depths.

The research, not only artistic, of Mark Steven Greenfield centers on the retracing of his Afro-American roots conducted through a careful study of photographs and testimonials. The artist appreciates the theatricality and gesticulation of Afro-Americans as witness of their original culture, at the same time condemning the stereotype of blacks as buffoons and fools constructed by white Americans in the 19^th century. Concise references to ‘Mammy’, caricatural image of the Afro-American woman, play a central role in the works on show.

 Carlo Marcucci, who is distinguished by his minimalist approach to sculpture, creates geometric solids and architectural structures of wood which he then covers by a humble and perishable yet extremely pliant material: spaghetti or udon, with various seasonings. What makes the sculptures sublime is the very color of the seasoning, which gives them the pure elegance and rough simplicity of Italian cottages, Japanese manka or Philippine cabins.

Yoella Razili adopts a minimal, geometric vocabulary that is absolutely neutral and not representative, based on a combination of straight parallels and uniform fields. The only field open to exploration for the artist lies in the ars combinatoria, in the form of relations between the different areas on the surface and the strips of light which pass through it and are reflected in the lucidity of the colors.

Richard Aber creates monumental sculptures and installations which ideally possess a force and energy capable of expanding in space, to conquer it as a plant whose roots burrow between the rocks, breaking them as they grow. Significantly, Aber’s works are furrowed by a web of lines which intersect like the branches of a tree or the nerves of a leaf. These lines, which may be the directrixes of a natural growth, bring us back to the work of Marco Abbamondi, the starting point of our visit itinerary.