Emotional suggestiveness. A bare room and a small dimly lit corridor. A diaphanous light entered from the windows. Outside, a grey sky. Dampness. In the room the paintings of a painter from Robegano, Augusto Baratto. Out of curiosity I wanted to see his paintings, I wanted to understand our land through his imagination. The strokes of the brush filled with emotional outburst, with suggestiveness and with strong imagination - painted that small, dark corridor. The colour on the canvas didn’t seem to stop to the tangible reality of the painted figures, on the contrary, it tended to abstract them, creating an object of the mind, something interior, rather than a real and animate subject. Venetian nature, still lives, foreshortenings, all the themes loved by the author; it looked like they could only be seen through memories, those very memories which - as time goes by - fade out, lo leave room to imagination, which has to link together again the missing parts. I went from a painting to another with changing emotions, and troubled thoughts. In my thinking, nature became alive, it was full-bodied, bursting with movement, more and more wide-awake. And the colour of the calm parts became increasingly alive, alight and thick with energy. The houses, the trees, the foreshortenings, everything looked like it was coming towards the observer, in an intricate, almost nervous way. While you are looking at Baratto’s painting you have the sensation of being among tangible reality, imagination, and an abstraction of concrete reality. Augusto Baratto has the sense of a narrative experience which becomes a poetic witnessing, connected with the light of an ancient civilization.

Mario Stefani