On place, form and impossible creation

Beyond the appearances that would make it exquisitely German – 'vast, scenic landscape seen from above’, wrote precisely Savinio to qualify that taste that lasted until the painting of Hans von Thoma – Dolz’s vision of nature is fixed in a constant light, without cycles, with no natural relationships, and given to the playful dimension of artefact colors [...]. In Dolz’s works we have a resistance of a simulation of space that is, so to say, traditional and entrusted to the traditional means of painting – a hint at an hallucinating, self-reflecting perspective, not exactly confinable to what is either near or remote. An extreme perspective, but still referring to a ‘place’ that, however unpredictable in its borders and one step away from ‘utopia’, remains essentially anchored in the ground of the twentieth century, although the net of signs, or the shards of colours, creates a dyslexic saturation in our look that is a similar, rather than to painting, to architecture or design, maybe even in a Dan Friedman’s architectural venues, which appeared in the sign of the expulsion of form from matter (or vice versa, which is the same), in an expansion of the space beyond the traditional fracture of interior/exterior, to the conquest of unity in continuity... Or maybe, on another non-visual ground, with Extensions, by the American Morton Feldman, with those free successions of slow, pianissimo sounds. Not that Dolz's paintings have anything to do with the transcriptions of chromatic sounds practiced, for example, by Kandinsky. They are rather similar to Feldman’s sound, which is the constructive principle of those who follow its natural vibration, to this colour who builds itself suggesting to the artist a pure adjustment, that is not contaminated by cultural or merely visual pre-figurations. They are similar to the use of counterpoint, to use another metaphor, between a strong color paste made by vibrant tones and unspeakable shapes and yet not weak, but squared off in space, so that it feels at times recklessly ‘diagonal’ and at times as if in flight from the top, with our gaze focused on a 'primary' form caught in the beauty of its coming to life. It's that ‘pure color’ that Benjamin described as ‘the instrument of fancy, and not the rigid canon built by an artist’.

Andrea Beolchi

In the catalogue of Opere 1997-1998