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METAPHYSICS IN THE PRESENT DAY
...Associated with Saturn, the lord of the gods who was defeated and dethroned, melancholy is a symbolic and existential position that seems to rule out the future and change, binding the individual to a indeterminate condition, with neither hope nor future. A sort of boundless suspension.
In the case of Matteo Confalonieri, this situation is related to an internal contrast, between the apparent normality - even ordinariness - of the circumstance and its profound latent disquiet. This is no contrast between internal times, as in the case of the situations depicted by other great melancholics of painting, such as Giorgio De Chirico or, in a different vein, Filippo de Pisis; it is a contrast between modes, between emotional substances that crops up punctually in every painting. In White Carnival, Black Carnival, for example, an adolescent covered by a bomber jacket, or by a dark stain that makes him into a threatening, undefined presence, steals a handful of confetti from a little girl, who does not seem to notice. But what is even more striking is the same little girl in the opposite panel of this diptych, where she is smiling (but doesn't that smile look just a bit overdone?) next to a little dog, both of them isolated not against an empty background, simply, but against the background of a void, of an amorphous darkness that seems capable of swallowing them whole from one moment to the next...
PASSAGE WRITTEN IN THE OCCASION OF THE EXHIBITION: "TEMPO SOSPESO"