Giuseppe Gallo has abandoned the use of figures in precarious states of balance that characterized his earlier work. Now he subjects the very idea of painting to a precarious balance. In his recent work, oil paintings on canvas, the color black is the protagonist—this is black not as an absence of color but rather as a formative nucleus. Black is used in all its layered possibilities; it is liquid, vibrant, germinal.

The painting that I considered the cardinal piece in the show, Sogno orizzantale (Horizontal dream, 1985), contains formal and metaphorical elements that clarify this new stage in