IMPRESSIONS OF A MEETING of Stefania Lanuzza Informal Look without the pretension to falsely appear dowdy or of tendency, mass of curly hair, mild but definite look, direct, sincere; Filippo De Mariano waits us on the before church square the cathedral of Saint Lucy of the Apple. We meet there because to find his study in the labyrinth of alleys of a centre of medieval origin is not easy. This way this run becomes a gradual way, polite to introduce us in its world of spontaneous artist, instinctive, a world that unexpectedly it becomes animated of atmospheres and suggestions well distant from the weight of the history and the western civilization that there are left hardly to the shoulders. When it begins to tell himself we find surrounds us from a crowd of lengthened figures, turned by the fleshy lips and eyes, so many eyes that observe us without curiosity and rather they seem to want to talk of itself to the evidence of the simple apparition. More painted they are open windows on a primitive humanity, firmly anchored to her own roots, in symbiotic relationship with a deprived nature of corruptions. The images are circumscribed by painting of the background of an intense red that a strong visual impact provokes but he doesn't succeed in containing the vitality and the slow gait of this ideal ethnic group, in which races and colours are mixed resulting in a timeless dimension but somehow intensely near, immediate. The experimentations in musical field and generally the sonorous suggestions that originate from the ethnic music, usual frequenting of De Mariano, has had a decisive role for the constitution of a patrimony of feelings interiorized and then translated under other form of expression in colours, silhouettes, signs. To make art for him as inevitable action shapes him, dictated by a creativeness that it directly draws to the chaotic world of the unconscious and it refuses any conceptual mediation. Fruit of this special disposition of the mind that is always pleasant to discover in an artist, is the "photo" (so he calls her) of Black Africa, notes of a trip still to complete in a world that doesn't stop practicing its inexhaustible charisma. To wonder how much has engraved in the painting of De Mariano the knowledge of the African art and the sequence of illustrious precedents that to this universe they have approached and they have made part of it, it could appear discounted or even risky. But it is not, since in his production an authentic adhesion is still gathered to a reality position of symbolic values. The unconditional trust in an instinctual strength that drives the hand in the choice of materials and forms, gives the certainty to act excluding the eventuality to incur in errors to De Mariano or equivocal of sort: a knotty trunk, a big box of cardboard, the leaf of an old window they speak from itself and they are docilely lent to become other, manipulated by manual procedures that evoke the meticulousness of the handicraft practice. The works of De Mariano drive us through a layout articulated by consequential passages: from a painting from the hybrid line still and from the complex composition but always balanced, he passes to an intermediary phase, characterized by a progressive fragmentation of the reported images for episodes; actually to land to the decisive turn of the most recent works that maintain a recognizable stylistic figure (through the usual chromatic range and some of the subjects already experimented), but they are attested on first essential floors that leave greater liberty to the sign and they open new possibilities to the form. De Mariano is identified with these presences, it confuses him with them, and it proposes him in the deprived self-portraits of descriptive tinsels, bald heads through which it is easier to free the ideas. A trip therefore in which are read the laps of a coherent run to the search of a figurative language that it assumes as personal characteristics more and more.