The title, “Revenge Gold”, doesn’t want to pass unnoticed. These lapidary words allude to gold’s power, seduction, and curse. Yet, they also remind us of Ennio Morricone’s song, “The Ecstasy of Gold”, closing Sergio Leone’s “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly”. At the movie’s end, the audience hears a powerful orchestra accompanying a duel set in a small cemetery, where a bandit buried a coffin filled with shimmering gold coins.
Does the title “Revenge Gold” intend to underline the inflationary abyss of today’s money, devoid of any golden substrate, too? Or maybe to reiterate that gold’s value is not just economical but essentially spiritual, evoking alchemic transformation practices to eliminate its defects and impurities? Of course, material and spiritual is an often-irreconcilable dichotomy, yet gold has made it harmonious for millennia: royalty, wealth, gift, and elevation, but also corruption and violence.
However, “Revenge Gold”’s dark side becomes evident in its assonance with “Revenge Porn”, an unfair and illegal practice that clearly illustrates the unethical malpractice of “possession”: gold encapsulates the love and the gossip, the outbursts and the slanders.
Indeed, Cingolani’s artistic practice has always oscillated between a tale’s materiality (either epic or grotesque) and the search for stasis and contemplation. During the Eighties, Cingolani created a series of artworks dedicated to Wall Street, the economic power derived from the accumulation of money and its own caducity. After that, he started working on the famous series titled “Interviste” (“Interviews”), artworks inspired by historical events loaded with symbolism. Then, he focused on a recent series dedicated to “Pathos Formel”, in which a tale, no matter how mysterious, manages to survive.
On the contrary, in the newly exhibited series, there is no trace of society, mediatic communication, metaphors, or pareidolia. Instead, we see the simple roughness of an almost entirely golden surface, hosting a compact texture of layers and allowing marks, spots, specks, shadows, shreds, and crushings to emerge. The canvas becomes the space for the matter’s transformation, a physical melting pot in which the artist’s body becomes a means to celebrate the artistic practice, a social ritual of alchemy, aimless and unjustified if not for the creation of art itself. Here, the painter has prolonged himself through his instruments, beyond the brushes and the colors, the iron brushes, forks, absorbent towels, and the serrated knives used to layer and remove matter until the artwork presents itself in all its clarity and brightness. The gold - the Revenge Gold - prompts all of Cingolani’s typical characters and symbols to undergo a sort of cleansing in an alchemic melting pot, where the continuous overlays eliminate any regular practice. This way, it nullifies that “Mediterranean damnation” of wanting to appease the viewer by telling them a story: the painter spreads a hand of gold on his own satisfaction and starts over with the enthusiasm and the emotion of the first time.
