"Almost astonished veronicas": when facing Luca Serra's works, Francesco Arcangeli's ancient critical shard (1958) comes up to memory. Another one is the 1890 Maurice Denis' opening line, through which he highlights "the fertile concept of a flat surface covered with colors in a certain order." Both sentences are related to a way of painting, which is anything but abstract - and to a certain extent, the topic of representation or not is one of the least successful in modern art and one of the least interesting for this artist - but they are useful to measure the relationship wanted by Serra between the observer and the art work. It is a matter of doing and being done, it is not an image conceivable without its specific body. The problem of the mental and physical process, in which the artist dives in completely - and always consists of interrogations, never of verifications or even demonstrations - is its own concrete physiology, the story of its own future.
Serra's generation is now mature and did realize that the artwork is not just a matter of moving our body's physical and emotional energy into the painting's body. It does not even consist of releasing experience into the cold essence of minimizations, where awareness is too often replaced by calculation. Neither it represents a prearranged and totally reconceived way of certification, nothing but a further dress added by talent and style.
Recalling Gastone Novelli's solemn commitment ("I will never make a painting in my life again, but I will create only events, and if they will be too big, never mind"), Serra chose to deal with the supremely ambiguous fullness of painting. He transformed it in the most proper place for a tenacious, ruthless and inflexible way of thinking, each time hidden and accessible through those concrete actions leading to the birth of the work of art. Even Serra may say: "I am fascinated by the event, by what occurs beyond my control and my intentions": it must be added he is also extraneous to any hint of reflection about painting. Here, painting is the unique protagonist. He definitely quits the outdated idea of control as moving from an operational planning to a necessary result, whether it may be complying with a dubious ritualization of the pictorial fact, or following what has been brilliantly defined by Jean-Bertrand Barrère as “mentalité décennale”, which was also confirmed by Paul Valéry with his “l’ennui du choc”. "If the painting is exactly what I am able to do or give - says Serra - why should I paint?" wonders properly Serra.
He chose and still chooses to assign a place, and especially a time, to his thinking. The location is the suspended and silent space where he works in perfect solitude around Almerìa. His isolation is truly far away from the snobbish loneliness associated with genius, as well as it is physically distant from those places where art discussion becomes too often blague, a chatty farce, a frivolous game lost among skepticism and masturbation. This place conserved a different measure of time, which Serra believes fundamental. This is a mental time, made of reflections and questions, hypothesis and innovative creations, which work as a trigger. It is the long, arduous, complex, examining time of the painting's creation. This is a crucial time, in which everything is crucial, since any choice emanates and absorbs new thoughts and new questions. Serra writes in his notes: "The pictorial work is not literally painted, but is, rather, the execution of a cast of the previously stretched painting on a prepared surface”. Practically: the chain of actions played by Serra to realize the whole operation expects the disposition of pictorial substances, different by nature and density, on a selected surface. Then a canvas, previously treated with adherent acrylic, is placed over it. The substance impression will create another substance, different from the previous one. In simple terms, this action recalls a bit of a cast, a pictorial rip, as well as of Robert Rauschenberg's transfer printmaking, even if this was conceived in a completely different environment, with different procedures starting from existing images. Instead, for Serra the original surface represents only a necessary but totally de-identified precondition. The effective conclusion happens once the canvas had completed its transfer, modifying the initial situation in a definitive way. The transfer concerns the traces of gestures spreading colors, the clear cadences along the two juxtaposed supports, while the same tones are matched through their rough or nervous identities. Through this transfer, surface becomes a totally extraneous image to something handmade: Alberto Zanchetta reads these canvases "as if they were acheiropoieta", "not painted by human hands". As we said, like "astonished veronicas".
It is clear that the primary qualifying element is the removal of the gestural effect, the physical relationship between agent and acted, together with the addition of an essential acceptance of all implicated variations and accidents. So, it really consists of observing the painting's development, helping it to happen, while making crucial the gap between the author's forming imagination, an intention open even to its own partial contradiction, and the final result. To recall Duchampian filigrees, Serra's option is not connected neither to indifference or indetermination. The quantity of unpredictable or unplanned factors - such as the substances' reactions during the process, due to the light, the air, the cast phases - leaves a casual possibility, which is created and welcomed by the artist, an accomplice and not the owner of the event. Because of these aspects, and only for them, the artificiality of this process shows some similarities to the ceramist's activity. He does not work on the work of art, but on its prediction. He accepts the many accidental factors happening between the fabrile process and the solutions coming out from the open oven. He loves, with emotion and surprise, the final result.
By a reading point of view, Serra's works offer a strongly tactile perception, although with a low objecthood rate. In his mature visual economy, where architectural pauses are nothing but visual cadences, they are not the result of a composition, differently from the not-objective tradition they come from, but as a maçonner, essential to sustain the skeleton of visual expectations, spreading vertical and horizontal lines for the balance of space and nothing more. Through a distant confrontation, these pauses are close, in a certain way, to the visual veining in the first chalks and the first Achromes by Manzoni, such as their mere elemental structure, presented in its absolute concreteness and made of partitions created inside substance itself, instead of being imposed artificially following a previous plan. Similarly, they do support, through Serra's basic structure, applications, additions, changes in the pace and volume of substance as well as gestural variations.
Serra's work on tones is even more complex and fascinating, revealing his pure and naked poetic abilities. Even in this case, it is pointless to focus on the naturalistic leftovers hidden in his combustive blacks, the various range of rose ochre colors, the greys coming from cement, his reds at times deriving from dark browns, given the artist's accurate selection to transform them in not-objective statements, as it happened, to a certain extent, to Ben Nicholson in the Thirties. The sour and enchanting nature surrounding Almerìa must have influenced him, who grew up celebrating the ground colors of his Bologna, in a similar way as Horta de Ebro did on the young Picasso. It is simple for him to combine this visual scent and tendency with his discrete and never declamatory approach, full of careful hesitations. Then comes the incursion of blue as a counter-melody (and those who know ancient Greek colors are aware that the primary cadences were already between the ground and the sky), taking important responsibilities regarding weight and movements in the last artworks, even if it avoids meretricious sensitivity or easy visual and stating interceptions. Therefore, many elements are now stable in Serra's painting pot, such as precise pictorial choices coexisting with sharp post-conceptual thoughts, the elaboration of a slow and revitalizing process - time is the artist's first measure - which prefers focusing on operating rather than executing, and the coincidence between the internal story of an artwork and the existential awareness of the artist. His paintings require a different reaction from the observer, in tone or not with an aware expectation of recognition and definition. Looking at Serra's paintings is not a matter of question/answer: it is the experience of temporal extension, taste, intensity.

Time passes, but is seems to leave Art unharmed. Me, as writer, received the confirmation of this fact in the ten years of following Luca Serra’s work. The more I observe his work morph over time the more I am convinced that they may live forever, as if they were Acheiropoieta, “not the product of human hands”. There is a creative process in these paintings that tends to de-personalise the pictorial gesture and, so to speak, a valorization of the identity of their author. It is strange how the word ‘identity’ can correspond to two alternating concepts: one expresses the profound awareness of the individual; a distinctive entity from others, the other unifies it and dismisses it, thus retaining that it is identical to something else. In Serra’s work we witness an analogous conflict, because in the attempt to reduce the painting to its essential values, the artist obtains the diametrically opposite effect; an increase in its own individuality.
The rigor that we recognize in these pictorial structures belongs to the decrees of the Modern Movement (1), ordained to the less is more. The distribution of the surfaces may recall largely the abstract geometry, that now seems inspired by a spirit that was absent in the historical avant-garde (the geometry of the artist’s work seem to vibrate continuously, without ever risking to become stiff). The cult of order, that of an overly sensitive sphere close to the divine becomes, once again, human; made of attempts and reworked versions that persist in pursuing an impossible goal. There is a desire for control in the division of the space, and simultaneously a loss of the same, at the moment in which the model unveils and reveals an unexpected pictorial aspect, an aspect intuited but undefined a priori.
The use of the locution pictorial rather than painting is not a coincidence; in the work in this exhibition we do not see the generative, primary and founding gesture but just its shroud, the ‘received’ shape as unexpected gift. What we are observing is an imprint, a memory that – similar to a ghost - allows us to imagine what went lost or distorted in the final phases of the pictorial process. In order to completely understand this question, it is necessary to take note of the words of the artists when he explains that the project of the image «is subject to a reverse image, a real and proper mould, by means of several layers of acrylic glue, that then become color, on a canvas that is then detached from its original support; the final state of the work is different in its essence to what was painted. This method is therefore a kind of alchemy during which the colors, the symbols and all its pictorial surfaces are a product of an oxidation; an osmosis between painting and receptive surfaces, of the temporary surface of the tar, and the assimilation-division of the glue of the mould» (2).
In all working cycles by Serra we encounter an evident serial quality; a reiterative loop that underlines discards, uncertainties and differences between one artwork and another; a blind pursuit that in the end, surprises the author as much as the viewer. Chasing perfection is impossible, but it is this awareness that allows the incontestable impulse: wanting to “excel, deficiency notwithstanding”. What is perfect instills in us a veiled boredom, while the curiosity of the perfectible is always dignified, it allows for an infinite amount of experiments, to be explored and analysed. Serra therefore is outside the already determined itinerary, the predictable, that would risk limiting his authorship, relegating him to the role of simple executor. In this case the artist remains maker of his pictorial calling, forced (even if in a pleasant way) to confront himself and to renovate its own language.

Serra’s work is imprinted with his concept of life, art, passion and emotions. They seem: “not made by human hands” even when the abstract tension seems to come closer to the real, a concrete, physical, tactile reality. So, what if these aniconic art works were nothing different than still lives, or maybe, landscapes? Théophile Gautier said that "L’horizon charme l’œil: à quoi bon le toucher?" [«The horizon spells the eye – why join it?»] (3). If not exactly landscapes, then it would be legitimate to consider them architecture. Observing the artist at work, a spontaneous comparison with the constructive interventions of Carlo Scarpa arises; the unforgettable style of the Venetian architect rediscovered today in the wall-like surfaces obtained with formworks, that once removed created imprints on the covering of the wooden surfaces, lending their specific woof and weave on the walls. The result obtained by Serra is not dissimilar when he detaches the canvas from the pictorial support, obtaining an exfoliated skin in which we recognize the development of the materials. In Scarpa’s reinforced concrete and in the rubber of Serra we acknowledge the need to leave a trace of the previous work, visibly showing how much went wasted in the various phases of the working process. What we see is “what remains”: an ode to the intentions.
Sometimes Scarpa added other materials to the cement paste, so that the drips would acquire hues that tend toward ochres or reds. In turn, Luca Serra uses cement in powder mixed with different pigments (note the golden halo’s that revive the bituminous background color, or the reds that excite the greys). The artist’s palette owes much to his encounter with Spain. The earthy and dark hues are those of a landscape dear to Zurbarán and Velázquez, to the Masters of the informal and to Miquel Barceló.
Serra is hungry for “local color”: that of dust and sand, of the earth and straw, of wood and charcoal, of ashes and of soot. The mystical, passionate, grotesque Spain, sweet and fierce, is the artist’s country of choice and adoption.
The instinctively loved Iberian landscape became a spiritual homeland to him, a place of the soul. His first trip to the south of Spain dates back to 1984, he would come back four years later, but 1999 was crucial, the year in which he established himself near Almería.
His ties to Spain, lived and assimilated in his painting, are also revealed in an unmistakable way in the titles of his works. The titles of the paintings are anything but explanatory and retain their suggestive quality, wrapped in a halo of uncertainty that indulges the aspirations of the artist, according to which all of us are more in need of process than product. Indeed his paintings are the consequence of the unexpected, of randomness and of circumstances that contrast with their final appearance, similar to a rock, whose shape is indelible and ineluctable. These “incidents” – as the artist calls them – articulate times and events that are of fundamental importance to Serra’s experimentation; the mould in rubber is not simply a technique, but rather a theory that wants to confute itself, thus verifying the initial idea and that which is effectively produced (4).
At the end of the day, this work is nothing more than the mould of reality without embellishment, rough yet refined. The paintings of Luca Serra give us back a layering of signals and gestures, in inclusions and exclusions, just like the engraved rocks in the primitive caves. They are “ancestral walls”, original, even more than original, that continue a dialogue that has its roots in the beginning of time, at the birth of human existence and the existence of art itself.

 

1. It was one of the most important movements in the history of architecture, whose theories and experiences postulated the abandonment of historical styles, the eclecticism and the classicism in favor of a design language which combines simplicity and functionality
2. L. Serra, Gris y Grandes Dibujos, Lorenzelli Arte, Milano, March 2012, p.15
3. T. Gautier, España, Mondadori, Milano 2001, pp.6-7
4. For example: the color halos that are formed on the canvas are a reverse reaction with respect to try to delete them by rubbing.
   

In an essay on Francis Bacon, Gilles Deleuze says that the present painting offers "three big directions [...]: abstraction, expressionism and what Lyotard calls the Figural, which is different from the figurative, exactly one production of figures”. (1)
The term figural appears as an escamotage of the brilliant French philosopher to introduce a pictorial typology that can not be comprised within the now-classic schemes of abstraction and figuration, as it is equally refractory to both definitions. Yet the term figure, from which the adjective figurative, defines both the shape or appearance of an image, either the symbol, allegory or meaning which on it is based. We are therefore led to believe that the figural is a category that is distinguished from the figurative by a different degree of approximation to reality.
The figurative painting, in fact, gathers the images from reality, with greater or lesser degrees of fidelity, where the figural painting would produce the images through an endogenous process and, therefore, not mimetic. By accepting this terminological distinction, we find ourselves, however, to face more questions than we could to solve.
Since even abstract art is using figures not derived from the phenomenal reality, what, then, would discern it from figurative painting? It is clear that the suggestion of Lyotard, quoted by Deleuze, leads us nowhere. More sensible, However, it seems the definition of Achille Bonito Oliva, who, discarding the traditional antinomy between abstraction and figuration, writes that "The figure is the focal point of the art", for "holding the centrality of language, as it is the bearer of the intention and the desire of power of the imaginary”, adding, then, that "this desire disguises itself through various attires, assumes the role of the condition related to the expressive needs” . (2)
If we accept the definition of Bonito Oliva, we also clarified a doubt about the search of Luca Serra, who has repeatedly stated that his "is not properly abstract art”, because starts from a real and concrete occurrence, which is the result of a combination of predetermined factors and guided accidents.
For Serra "the pictorial work is not literally painted, but is, rather, the execution of a cast of the previously stretched painting on a prepared surface”. In practice, the artist uses tar paper covered panels on Which has laid, following a very personal sense of order and balance, tempera, pigments, powder, chalk and glue coats. On this prepared surface, the artist glues the canvas, which then removes. The tear has for consequence the removal of part of the chromatic materials, glues and tar paper present on the matrix and the canvas is, thus, imprinted as in a sort of cast whose outcomes are only partially predictable.

Observing the works of Luca Serra, it is natural to ascribe them to the field of abstract research. On his rubber molds on canvas, in fact, they do not appear recognizable forms, nor vague shadows that can suggest the idea of some presence. There are, rather, signs and traces, washed out and abrasions, scraps and fragments that compose between them an unexpected textures, a weaving that appears to be coherent, balanced in weight and mass. The impression given by these color markings, which also possess a sort of order in certain horizontal or vertical scores, is that of being in the presence of surfaces that have suffered the abrasive action of time and weathering.
Those that crop up on Serra paintings are figures in the proper sense expressed by Bonito Oliva, namely as "bearers of the intention and the desire for power" of an imaginary that, in his case, turns to be an attempt to appropriate the aesthetic qualities of matter and a fierce desire to possess, and perhaps to recreate the chromatic enchantment of certain mineral surfaces, whether stones or earths. It is on the base notes of this hunger for knowledge, this insatiable curiosity, that Serra plays his painting.
A painting that has the characteristics of a challenge, sometimes amusing and sometimes dramatic, between man and nature, between the artist's technical quality and the intrinsic properties of materials.

For this, the procedure put in place by Luca Serra does not resemble in any way to that one, all exquisitely mental of abstract artists. His painting is equally equidistant from the theoretical premeditation of Minimalism as by spontaneous gestural Action Painting. Rather we feel in it a pressing need for empirical verification of occurrences that elapse in the chemical osmosis of the cast, when the canvas is imprinted on the matrix.

”I’m fascinated by the event - the artist writes in his notes - from what happens out of my control, beyond my intentions”. Luca Serra can only imagine the result of the chemical metamorphosis which are produced in the only blindness moment of the entire process. However, when the matrix and the cast adhere in the dull darkness of pressure, the substances mingle and alter in an almost uncontrollable way, producing amazing results.
Serra plays therefore a risky game between order and chaos, between the sequential causality of his Opus, and randomness (guided) of alchemical transmutation.

“I want that painting - says the artist - should be able to give me something; I am the spectator, the first viewer of my painting”. In simple terms, the Serra attitude recalls the one of a research scientist at which, after setting all the elements, all that remains is to observe the final result of the experiment.

His is, therefore, an immersion in the doing of painting, intended not just as the unfolding of an exercise end in itself, but as the possibility of an epiphany, a revelation of aesthetic order of the cosmos, that goes beyond a mere voluntary act and aligns the artist's intention with the secret laws that govern nature. That's why, in his case more than in that of other artists, we can speak of the alchemical process. The great alchemists of the past knew that their efforts were strained not so much to achieve a tangible result, as, for example, the base metal into gold, but to understanding the operation of the intimate nature of all things. The Great Work corresponded to an initiatic and spiritual way of imitation of creation.

Now, the art of Luca Serra looks like an investigation, so much pictorial as ontological, on the genesis of chromatic and visual effects that seem to belong to the phenomenal world much more than the algid geometries or pseudo-organic forms that recur in so much abstract art.
And it is for this reason that the term "abstract", referring to his work, it seems inappropriate, almost restrictive. When we think about an abstract work we interpret it first as the aesthetics formulation of a project concept or a modus operandi, which translates the formal ideas on more factual plan of the art. Serra, however, adds a substantial shift, of the unexpected event, of the elusive occurrence in which the aesthetic intuition can manifest itself in the form of unveiling. A revelation that comes from the material itself, from nature - would be tempted to say - assuming, therefore, an objective value that the artist can not dominate or control completely. Whenever his technique becomes too refined and the result of it too predictable, Serra changes method, introduces new steps to "safeguard" the fundamental gradient of surprise, preserving, with it, the pleasure itself of discovery and learning.
"If the painting is exactly what I am able to do or give - says Serra - why should I paint?". It is revealed in this statement the initiatory meaning of his artistic doing, which think about the painting as the relationship between the intention and the result and, therefore, as the divergence that creeps between the idea and the finished form, which here it passes through the experience of matter. A matter, he said, "hostile to changes," but at the same time, principal agent of it.
Just as in the alchemical course, which requires the disciple to confront first of all with the brutal and formless substance, in that long, preliminary phase known as Opera al nero.

The works of Irreversible series, which represent the latest results of the artist's research, are another proof of how painting can dig into the inner recesses of nature without tracing over the shapes. Serra does not imitate the phenomenical world, but tries to capture its secrets, to seize the essence. And that is why the figures of his painting never assume the guise of real things, but they merely suggest the idea of shapeless and elusive textures, that remind the chromatic effects of rusty inflorescences of land , of the crumbling plasters, of moisture emulsions, but also of bituminous halos, of wreaths of water vapor, of the scratched chalks ,of abrasions of the solvents, of the residues of glue,of the traces of oxides, in short, of all the whole irresistible, brutal fresco of the Earth's chemistry.

 

1    Gilles Deleuze, DIVENIRE MOLTEPLICE, pag. 104, Ombre Corte, Verona, 1999
2    Achille Bonito Oliva, Figura: una semiotica della grazia, in IL SOGNO DELL’ARTE, pag. 9, Spirali Edizioni, Milano, 1981.

[..] They found that when we look to something carefully we are pushed or to hold your breath for several seconds, or otherwise to breathe less deeply than usual. And the reason is that when we focus on some object seems to us that the sounds and the same feeling of muscle movement are sources of distraction (1) [..] - Aldous Huxley

The Evangelist Luca was really a painter? The portraits of the Virgin Mary attributed to him testify to the ancestral desire to transform the matter into sign, and hence the sign in language; but a language is constituted of individual lemmas that cannot be isolated, for which the sign - once transposed - aspires to return into matter.
Inevitably.
This is proved by the invention of the design that was of Butade, the first of all sculptors.
He filled with clay the incision made on a wall by his daughter - who overnight has portrayed the beloved by following the features projected by a lumen - and obtained a relief. Ironically, the discovery of the drawing is therefore attributed to a sculptor and not a painter (could not be otherwise); “paradox" that is substantive in French boutade, "whim", "quirk" which is also a genre of painting, graphic especially.
But the ambitions of vraisemblance (2) are not noticed in the work of Luca Serra, who admits the visible only as a functional image in the proceeding [in statu nascendi], therefore the paintings as "knowledge of things through their first causes "[causarum cognitio].

This is because gods are the only having knowledge of fullness; Men, however, are reduced to guesswork. Conjectures that for Serra they move from the visible in function of the invisible : through the material it is made the world and what is immaterial lurks inside. “Matter - says Goethe - each one has before his eyes; the content it is only for who has something to add and form is a secret for most" Once that is ascertained that the inexpressible of the sign does not result for this unthinkable, springs the invocation of the matter [Veni creator spiritus] looking for a pneuma (3) in which coexist the thought, as endogenous process, and the action , as exogenous process. Atmospheric air and alveolar air are then converted from volatile element into thought-soul.

From the - necessary - dependence with the world, breathing pursues an osmotic relationship, also introduces a contiguity between the Psyche and the environment, especially in the case of the Italian popular spirit which is conveyed in the air (4) even when changes settlement (the conflict between the body and the head asserted by Steiner, which makes the Italian a "man of nerves", fails when the thought, being produced by the brain, has aerobic necessity ).

"At primitive observation of the breathing we need to add another one that could singularly reinforce the idea of power of breath. It is the action of the breath on the fire" [Paul Valéry]. An afflatus that extinguishes instead to nourish. That stifles the igneous red of the series Caucho, cools the color leaving in its place the ashy of the relics, scattered and calcified on the canvas in the manner of a rain - of ash and lapilli - on the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum.
These new works, these "cuentos / tales” are like dust in the wind that human breathing purifies from the fine dust. Are [epi] phenomena of the intellect; they transform any material into energy, into life / mental process.
The thought is one, but continuous, subjected by the principle of transformation. Of Multiplicity. The haecceity: the principle that each thing is different from the others.
Although if in its totality the world was created according to an original type, in it proliferates the detail that tends to diversify, to change, as the antithesis to the "whole" of the Greek philosophy that, conversely, is immutable [mutatis mutandis]. Everything has a mould, from animals to plants,from the mineral to man, none of which is free from anomaly (meaning by it the uniqueness of each individual, like distrust to the exemplarity) that makes it different, unique. That shows that even the mould is something different from the original, it is rarefaction, copy after copy ever more. Nevertheless use damages the cliché, it wears out, it causes rupture. And if the deterioration is the primary cause of his exhaustion, the mould must be changed, renewed or improved before it can incur in a deleterious worn-out.
From a primordial model also generate art.
The rubber casts of Serra gather oxides, powders, adhesives, rubber, tar, graphite, gypsum - and so - according to the dictates of a module that cicatrizes on the canvas (surgical suture dating from Burri to San Luca, which in truth was a doctor and not a painter); the concretion of the detail, the fragment that is re-composed, thus tends to order the abstract universal.
At the model and at the module is then annexed the matrix, which is in Serra an idea respect to the environment: it is geomorfia.
In it are reflected the different color phases, to undergo a manufacture process / refining of the vile matter surrounding the artist ... probative metamorphosis into noble material. From white (turbid) in ivory, yellow in gold,gray in silver . Atomistic exchange that is explained in Parmenides' " changing location and changing bright color ", singenesis in all similar at chameleon that feeds with air (5).
Where the compulsions of the paintings are confronted with the collation of haecceitism, and of the etcetera, the work of Serra becomes discursive on the example of the Conversazioni (6) of the '90s. The Piittura senza qualità proprie (Painting without own qualities) that had preceded the present search it continues in the more or less explicit allusions of the titles, puns that reference to the different materials and appearance tone, as Pestábile and Choupolvosis. Because the technique of polychrome is nothing but a proportion, color = cover.
Cover the sign in an attempt to reabsorb, to engender. With deuteragonist effort, of painter-sculptor [Serra] in antithesis to a sculptor-draughtsman [Butade].

 

1  From: A. Huxley, The Art of Seeing, Arrangement with Chatto & Windus Ltd. - London 1943.
2   “appearance of truth; verisimilitude”.
3   principle-breath informing the world.
4   in this regard see the Berlin conference of 1918, later collected under the title
       “Anthroposophische Lebensgaben” nel Rudolf Steiner Verlag - Dornach 1991.
5   As it was argued in Pliny's Naturalis Historia.
6   series of paintings that the artist has developed in the second half of 1990.