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The Strongholds of the Dream

Rosanna Dell’utri · 2006

The power of dreams. So wondrously boundless is the power of dreams that it whispers fables into the Homeric ear of singers everywhere, raising the self to a semi-divine dimension that grants and can do all. It can create, live with a millennial intensity, shape mental landscapes in which the protagonists take turns yet always share a non-space, from which the only thing excluded is the real. And when it is painters who dream, with the clear will to recount those dreams through expressive languages that lead the stranger's gaze deep into the nature of the oneiric, then one witnesses a miracle. The miracle of those who turn into sign what remains abstract for others, who give form and nuance to the dream, who tell a tale interwoven with brushstrokes, where every change of colour turns a page. Akira Zakamoto.
His art, with its brilliant colours, on square supports always of the same size, where the elements return, punctual, because intimately his own — like a familiar dream that recurs without surprise, welcoming within the circle of visions; the artist seems to transpose onto the canvas the negative of nocturnal mirages, photographed in the instant of revelation that opens the eyes, even in sleep. Painting without filters, a breach into the mind in the full hallucinatory phase in which the vision manifests, trembling and true. And so here they are: the stars that illuminate, the stones suspended in the void, spaceships gleaming with life-giving trails in a dimension that has nothing real about it. And in the foreground, eyes fixed on the observer's, faces of angels show the way of the possible, pointing to the island of eternal beatitude, the planet on which man will find salvation, always travelling — a personal exodus. There is a whole universe in the artist's canvases and, behind the vivid images, a philosophy of existence that shines through painting-tales rich with signs, allusions and plots never exhausted at a single fleeting glance. The Turin painter with the Oriental name builds his entire painting on the sense of contact with another world, a bridge that, through the delightful innocence of child-Masters and still-uncontaminated angelic creatures, allows man to land in the non-place where beauty can be savoured and grasped, in a dimension free of conditioning.
For Zakamoto, as for Palumbo, it is Utopia. When two painters unite under the sign of the oneiric, one witnesses a miracle, we said. One witnesses the building of an impregnable stronghold of the dream, the will to mark out the boundaries of a limbo in which creation is shared and the passage toward the non-place is offered and recounted. This is the story that will be told in a tower in Rivoli in September, through an exhibition of paintings whose different languages — Palumbo and Zakamoto — speak of the same other vision. From 23 September to 1 October, La Torre della Filanda becomes a sacred place in which paintings and indefinable realities, on the border between visual and auditory art, draw the public into a perceptive journey of sonic and tactile nuances. Where Zakamoto's angels will live, smiling, among the rocks of Palumbo's islands, in the untouchable Strongholds of the Dream.