A white like the milk in Wolfgang Laib’s milkstones. An aseptic background that becomes context, pavement and sky at the same time, a social pocket in which bodies float in the audacious normality of everyday life. Corrado Zeni’s world has chosen the aesthetic stamp of fading into the brightest of whites. The city is not there, and yet we can imagine it from the way the people walk, the forward flow, the erect positions which maintain the entropy of the real metropolis. An invisible city which comes across through the Ligurian artist’s pictorial vision, characterising a common template (the white city) within which different stories are set up, missed opportunities, individual events picked up in the eyes, in the clothing, in the postures, in the attitudes, in the ways of the people portrayed.
In actual fact, it all starts with the artist’s mimetic presence in the city. Zeni walks around, looks around, and looks around again, until he discovers faces that are more or less typical, anomalous looks, bodies with a particular energy. At that point he photographs the strangers he finds interesting, stealing a snapshot when he almost seems not to be there. Or rather, he gets close to them (close enough to take their picture) without declaring his presence, acting as an emotional collector of human energies, untold stories, imaginable events.
As we were saying, white is absolute, full and spongy with its astounding density. It is reminiscent of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s cinematic schemes, always in a state suspended between negation and memory, in a limbo between imagined forms and mental abstraction, events which have really happened and necessary fading. A white of synthesis and obsessive reiteration, a pictorial text which recreates the context in which human stories are set. This is the heart of his project: a geographic esperanto of cleanly applied paint, a true non-place summing up the many similarities between urban spaces. To Zeni this white means interior rhythm, primordial aggregation and animistic order of things, almost as if it were a quick-setting human glue. The technique itself, plaster mixed with rabbit-skin glue, reveals that the white comes from very far away, from working methods with ancient roots, now back again in the contemporary style of an Italian artist. White as body and spirit, figure and abstraction, near and far, true and false. White as origin and new energy of life.
The quantity of photographic material must be high, for theoretical and obvious practical reasons. Hundreds of snapshots are needed to select the most effective images, those which capture the artist’s sensibility and figurative interest. Once he has come up with the right combination of snapshots, he begins his digital construction of a human agglomerate that did not exist until now. Zeni juxtaposes people coming from different contexts, acting on the basis of interior assonances, resolved contrasts, disharmonies so strident as to ring particularly true. More real than many of the documentary photos in the glossy magazines, than those styles in which the photographer appears to have asked randomness to pose. Once he has prepared the frame with his unaware actors, he begins the process of painting, eliminating areas, enhancing details, inventing relationships. A new world is born out of a world we know by memory. We look at the bodies and we see ourselves out for a walk, but in a completely different way. Suddenly we think of a film, “Six degrees of separation”, in which an interesting theory (by sociologist Stanley Milgram) weaves invisible links among strangers who pass by each other in their day-to-day lives. Zeni reasons in a similar fashion and comes up with an ideal metropolis in which stories brush against one another and belong to one another, even when we can think of nothing they might plausibly have in common.
The atmosphere in which they are set is typical of today’s big cities. Wide roads and narrow alleyways, sidewalks and spaces through which thousands of people flow, perpetually late. Legs striding quickly toward a partial finish line, looks of concentration or simple intimidation, functional clothing that tells us something about their social status. Our first thought, in search of a physical archetype, flies to Manhattan: 5th Avenue, 6th Avenue, Madison Avenue, Broadway… big crazy streets where the masses become a bodily tsunami with a non-stop backwash. We try to imagine shops, skyscrapers and automobiles in place of the white background over which the figures float. We reconstruct the context instantly, but in doing so we lose the analytic focus on the people. It is as if Zeni has done with white what Philip-Lorca diCorcia and Gregory Crewdson did with photography when they isolated figures in the context of the city with their silhouettes of unreal light. Look at the paintings carefully and you will see that one of the people is always out of focus – a sort of inexplicable anomaly. That person is at the centre of everyone’s affairs, individual concentrations, timidities and absences, certain forms of eroticism consisting purely of looking. A sort of mysterious bug that catalyses our attention, an anomaly in the matrix of the figurative image.
Of course nothing is left to chance in the construction of the image. The way the people exchange looks, the distances and vicinities, the type of clothing, the accessories more or less clearly in evidence have a specific meaning. The paintings are gauged around the number of people in the field. The amount of white, the way perspectives fit together, the constant use of a frontal horizon running from left to right (for both straight lines and diagonals) and vice versa clearly have a meaning. The final result is an evenness of tone in which you have to look for the invisible cords that tie people together. And then their eyes count; you must look at their eyes and the postures of their faces. Some of them are walking slowly, others are running, some are waiting for something, a number of figures watch as if wondering about something. We will never know what, be we can transfer them into our own wanderings around the city, when we cross the street and look at strangers, imagining their lives, the passions and pain they manage to hide, the desires and disappointments they carry around with them, their thousand private eccentricities. And right after this we wonder how many things, and which things, tie us to them unawares. Before Zeni’s paintings we suddenly find ourselves wanting to get to know the unknown, enter it with an exciting blend of courage and risk. His art is a place of urban mystery, a catalyst of growing tension, an excessively “normal” dimension where Alfred Hitchcock and Georges Simenon might ideally come across Jim Jarmusch and Wim Wenders.
A fascinating, melancholic white, welcoming but dispersive for the orientation  of ordinary perspective. A colour of candid purity which lowers the stress of the city, the continuous hurry, the hyperkinetic rhythm of our working hours. It looks like the perfect space for rigorous electronic music, something like To Rococo Rot, Mouse On Mars, Akufen, Fila Brazillia… different sorts of groups who come up with pleasant sound constructions, distended metrics free of any predefined polarity, sounds in which we can let ourselves float free. Every successful work always has its ideal musical accompaniment, and in this case I see right away that this music not only accompanies the painting but is in Zeni’s DNA. A few weeks ago I wanted to ask him what he listened to, but I preferred to maintain a conviction of mine without even talking to him about it: that this electronic music belongs to his paintings, flows with his brush, through the figurative affairs of his ruthless observation of reality. And then, in the wake of sounds that have science fiction in their attitudes, might his works not be the synthesis of a world somewhere between “Matrix” and the John Carpenter of “They Live”? A place where electronic virtuality has scanned the world we believe we live in. A place of extremes that only painting could express in such an ambiguous, abstract, mental way.