There was a time when I wanted to see an insurrection in painting, an insurrection of a wave of feelings that touched the eyes like a knife would touch a cloth, thus feeling a tear, a groove, a bruise; At this time I didn't paint to understand the image, I painted to bother the eyes and hurt the imagination by the force of the image expressed on the canvas, I didn't want beauty, I wanted strength, I didn't want the understanding of the image, I wanted it to touch the eyes and hearts... this era is what I usually call the "expressionist phase", the nuances of which have never completely left me, perhaps because there is something in me that tends to be absorbed in what is called by historian Shulamith Behr the "Ausdruckscultur" - expressionist culture, which in his understanding is the same as Germanic culture.
The themes I wanted to paint were not beautiful, they were hard themes, heart-breaking themes, themes, however real, that I wanted to bring to the surface in a kind of voice of that which is not is being listened to, to cross the desert of insensitivity to awareness of the interior.
It was at this time that I painted "The useless cry", its year of production was 2014.
I do not display (although rarely, like now) this painting, I consider it too moving and even disturbing, as what it says is brutally real and current.
In 2014 there were events in Syria and the invasion of Crimea, promoting Soviet terror there.
Today these events continue, terrorizing the sovereign nation of Ukraine.
But before there were similar events, as they were provoked by the same aggressor, in Chechnya, Georgia, Belarus.
This is the progression of genocide, the warlike escalation of the Soviet terrorist state.
It was these events, this bloody turn and, in my eyes at the time, without a solution, that impelled me to paint The Useless Crying.
On the canvas, a mother with her face torn apart by impetuous brush strokes cries, with her eyes exaggeratedly bulging out, beneath the inert and pale body, almost a ghost, of her dead daughter . Expressionism exaggerated everything, so I borrowed this power of expression from them.
The mother's face in tears was inspired by Alpacino's performance features in "The Godfather 3", a brilliant performance, where he expresses in a scream and in an act, all the condensation of pain, a pain that hurts the eyes, the ears, the pain of losing what is most dear, an agony that touches the chest that fell apart due to a brutal existential rupture, Vitor Corleone would never again see his daughter, the character in The useless tears, equally, shatter before your loved one who has passed away.
But the crying of the mob of fathers and mothers seemed to be in vain, the world did not want to lend a hand, the distant solution seemed to run out like tears on the ground.
The entire canvas lies in red, painted without preparation, without care, only with expression, I wanted to give it the sensation of cuts, translating the equally painful cuts through brushstrokes of lacerating red of Goeldi's woodcuts.
In the background, the indifferent boots of a soldier, or a criminal wearing a uniform, in short, the murderer, walk in the opposite direction of the character in focus, as if having just carried out the act of execution.
The crying, without remedy, without remedy, falls to the ground.
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