Arnold Mario Dall'O. Republic of Welcome

Arnold Mario Dall'O's work is absolute in principle and variable in form. He tries not to throw out the western tradition of images, archives and cataloguing, but at the same time introduces the disorder of art, the freedom of association by which new objects are created out of other better-known, even everyday material. Proximate genus and specific difference: knowledge in our world is still Aristo-te-lianly anchored to these cornerstones. If we try mixing the positions, we gain the effect of estrangement, alienation. In practice we have the condition of artisticity, a category of objects that used not to exist. They are also objects whose property it is to make us change our opinion of the world. It is as though the fact of their existing changed all the rest, even what we have always known and grown accustomed to. Afterwards we see things in a new and different, and not exactly positive, light.
Dall'O's careful, sophisticated compositions are clustering wonders, Wunder-kammer: each work an Ambras in minia--ture. The words that appear are like labels, captions, shedding light on the dark gulf where things and their names fail to correspond. Only the rule of non-sense can lead us to face a stark new reality where we can expect no consolatory als ob.
We must experiment with a new language; we have no dictionary to translate what we see into what we know. Words and pictures are put on one and the same plane, both being forms of the visible. The original meanings are not indispensable - indeed, are scarcely bearable.