Boris Brollo
Curator
“In Portraits, Artistic People, I portrait people from the artistic world, leaders in history who leave their mark, who distinguish themselves, who have a charismatic power, material or intellectual, as artists, critics, curators, buyers, collectors or patrons” (Alfarone).
This is the meaning of his work, but an artist, like any scientist, cannot merely be a witness to his times; his personality and his interests influence his work. It is difficult to discover what had been imposed and what as been manipulated in a portrait of an artist. The true and the false nullify each other in the ‘non-space’ (Mare Auge) of the canvas, which is itself already a fiction of two dimensions, or if you prefer, the psychological stage of Wilde’s Dorian Gray. This is exactly the difference between Alfarone and the hyperrealist painters such as Chuck Close, who preceded him; while these are ‘vehicles for emotion’ (G. Celant), Alfarone’s paintings are vehicles for history, and his portraits retain that stamp of status, of mystery, or of belonging. The crossed signs of Tapies, the painterly hints of Vedova, the welder’s goggles of Cesar Baldaccini, or the mark of the Biennale lion of Jean Clair, or even the dark psychological side of Zigaina’s fight against the image of his own father. All these portraits, maintained against an indefinite background without time or place (exactly a ‘non-space’), which act as the mysterious and mystic aura of today’s Uffizi and places these portraits in a context more personal than collective, which demonstrates that the deeper choice of our heroes, or of the heroes of any epoch, is necessarily as arbitrary as history itself.