Dario Cusani, City Versus Nature, Artwork, 1987

THIS WORK (R:0345) of 1987 entitled "City against nature" represents the cementification of the territory, necessary to build high-rise buildings, which involves desertification symbolized by black, color of death! Outside the city, instead, nature has remained UNCONTAMINATED with its "bright colors" that are a symbol of life. I must acknowledge that since 1987 to the present (2024) many progress have been made with the creation, where possible, of parks and "urban green" as I already showed in my exhibition in New York in 2000! I BECOME A PROFESSIONAL ARTIST (1986) In the spring of 1986, with the closure of the Reporter newspaper, I decided to abandon entrepreneurial activity by liquidating the SIPE Società Italiana Pubblicità Editoriale created only 2 years earlier. A very beautiful, but also challenging period was coming to an end which had prevented me from painting as I had done for more than 20 years. But I didn't abandon the world of communication for which I had become a journalist 10 years earlier. The only change was the way of communicating, no longer with words, but with the images that had crowded my DAYDREAMS since I was a child. Even if only in those dreams did the WHITE KNIGHT always arrive to protect me from the abuses I received for my shyness and naivety. This is why since I was a child I had brought those images onto paper with pencil and crayons, drawings that were lost! These, together with the music I played on the piano both made me sail into the fantastic worlds of my imagination. A gift that I owe to my parents whom I gratefully thank. That change of job was also of life and gave me a charge of ATOMIC ENERGY which sent me fantastic images of real life which crowded my mind and I threw myself headlong into the new job. The first image was linked to an event a few months earlier when I went from Rome to Milan for work. City in which my twin brother Sergio lived who, at the behest of our father, had moved from Naples at the age of 18 (1966) to study economics at the famous Bocconi University. Sergio made me accompany him to his gigantic Mercedes and there on the dashboard I discovered a strange black object. I asked the driver what it was and he told me. “By the way, let us inform you that we are arriving a little late… yes, doctor, it's a mobile phone and yes, I'm in a car!”. I was surprised at the new thing that entered my brain. So it was that, after the turbulent phase of the closure of Reporter and my company and the sudden decision to dedicate myself to art as a form of "communication", that image of the telephone resurfaced! Then the KNIGHT ON THE TELEPHONE was born, his first work and his first research as a "professional artist". POST FUTURISM, that world after the future that brilliant people had donated to humanity with their inventions: the computer and the mobile. I believe they were the 2 brilliant and positive inventions of the end of the second millennium that no one at the time could have imagined to what extent they would change life on Earth in the immediate future!!! THE CITY The city is a place of coexistence between people, but also the historical memory and the present in the continuous development of its expansion and improvement. During my growth, however, I have experienced it in a negative way due to the worsening traffic, pollution and chaos that have increasingly pushed me to live, at least on weekends free from work, OUT OF TOWN, in houses by the sea or in the countryside or on the snow, 3 places I have always loved more than the city. In this catalogue I present 3 symbolic pictures about the city (R:0006, 0344 e 0345) made only in painting before 1994 when I invented my exclusive technique PHOTOPITTURA. And in total there are 100, a very small part of those I have realized in 60 years (now end 2024) that are over 7,000... nothing compared to Picasso who has made over 150,000!