Freedom for an artist is a slow conquest of an exclusive mental space ruled by the iron rules of pictorial work – freedom from the frozen codes and modules of a Manicheist vision of art production.

An artist must go beyond the limited borders of a world which is too definite and must carry on a sharp analysis of motivations inspiring art as well as his or her own role as an artist.

This means to recapture previous linguistic models not as a mere quotation but rather as a stylistic crossing towards a continuously changing image, outside the possibility of homologating results except for reference to technique.

So this is an art form standing on a double ridge including both transitivity and intransitivity. There is no improvisation but a balanced linguistic awareness, as a landing point for the images and pleasure perspectives which make up the biology of art. Yet it is a landing point which does not mark the end of the journey, but a passage through the intense stage of representation which thus acquires an unexpected amplitude including all the possible outlines without any limitations.

The work of art becomes a place where there is a movement paging and un-paging open and transient relations which make up the shifting moment of production; a meditation upon the transformation and circularity of artistic creation; a revisiting of the universe surrounding us – a universe consisting of objects, signs and ideas – to carry out projects coagulating around a dominating theme or a thought where the evocative quality appears of paramount importance.

Today we can do everything because the universe can no longer be defined as a category. In this intellectual climate action is shaped not only as going beyond but also as one possibility among many others.

A painting lasts as long as the dialogue between the subject and his or her working tools. Thus producing involves listening to the whispers of the world outside. The artist interacts with the matter to give birth to plural emotions which influence each other. The suggestion emerging from what is openly different stems from the structural meaning attributed to painting identified and approached in its solitude. It does not offer solutions but compels you to ask unending questions.

The course, the way to implement artistic conception has a beginning, a starting point which is not left behind your shoulders but keeps advancing and so should not be conceived as a remote origin, but as a need continuously renovating itself. It is an intense questioning no longer masked by moral or social justifications – a questioning taking place in the awareness of the work being produced.

An artistic act must be more and more inside itself, based on autonomous language and within the mental range where research is carried on. De-structuring and re-structuring take place in the essence of an ancestral matrix.

We are confronted with a kind of art opening the mind towards the process of creation and interpretation and following metaphysical line forces springing from mysterious symmetries. Paths unravelling along parallel worlds reveal variety in unity, a time-space continuum and a new representation of modernity.

With the purpose of carrying on the research started by maestro Carlo Patrone in the field of hermetic chemistry a group of artists has been formed whose name is Athanor – the alchemic kiln, the melting pot of physical, moral or mystic transmutations – who aims at learning the ideology of art and approaching the superior magistery of a work of art.

In the Athanor there flows the spirit of the world and the spirit of life, which an artist must be able to master in order to enliven matter and go beyond it, through a new escatological representation, a sign of phenomenic nature and sublimated expressiveness.

Alchemists call transmutation the change or alteration of elements in which they no longer appear what they used to be, having acquired different qualities and another appearance both internal and external. The process involves the body, the psyche as well as the spirit and gives origin to chaos.

Images do not loose their original meaning, but tell us that the sense, the answer to our questions must be sought beyond what we see and observe now and then, thus provoking a short circuit that links the thought of the artist and the art user in a close connection.

The transmutation, brought about by the changes in the inner energies of matter – typical of every substance – and in their rebirth, leads to the discovery of new relations and the creator becomes the initiate who is able to represent vital force transmuting it into an opus.

Alchemy is an imaginary science in the sense that it focuses on surprising procedures thus recording ideal impulses and liberating the tensions of the psyche.

The authenticity of utopia may be found in living this process actively as a creative transformation which projects itself into the body of the world with symbolic correspondence.

It is like operating at the same time an external metamorphosis of physical matter and an active interior change of the one who

struggles to create a work of art.

For the contemporary artist alchemy retains the fascination of a mythical paradigm in which we can see the reflection of the difficulties and achievements of creative research.

An opus is generated from suffering and, once completed, it gives back the artist to the initial suffering. Psychic changes correspond to the transmutations of matter and are signs of the unending transformation of life and the universe.

Light is born from darkness, form from lack of form, unity from division, harmony from contrast of opposites. The artistic process finds its own outcome and representation at different levels: from the physical level of the materials being used to the visual and harmonic level of forms and the ideal level of the spirit. All this is a paradigmatic expression of a system of thought having as a central reference point a cyclical conception of time and a dynamic vision of possible activities of realization. Form is a symbol in itself. From a merely metaphorical level you shift to the level of a specific practice: a practice which can’t be separated from theoretical and symbolic awareness.

Action changes substances ontologically, transforms them in their essence and is reflected in the choice of materials, in the implicit comparison between the composition and the artist’s idea and lastly in the secret which must envelope its completion.

The informal brings new life to the ancient parallelism between art and alchemy: from the inert chaos of matter to its animation into a form which is new, dynamic and in some ways dramatic.

Through its vital references, hermetic chemistry aims at supporting the transmutations of an art for ever changing and for ever equal to itself, in the utopia of a redemption operated by imagination over daily life.

Visual language should guide and facilitate the art user in understanding the contents which are represented. Each form may be defined as an excellent mnemonic medium and ordering tool between the past and the present, that is between the inexpressible and the apparent, the subject and the object.

The imaginative, both figurative and plastic, thus detaches itself from the exoteric nature of its memory, which is not structured, and from mere generalization thus taking part in the mysterious concert of symbols.

Research is addressed to the decoding and understanding of the hidden laws of Nature and of the rules which govern mutational movement, keeping the uniqueness of the Being in the unending flow of elements.