CORRADO SIMEONI'S PAINTINGS : AN ENORMOUS COURT DES MIRACLES Corrado Simeoni's cultural background has been analyzed in successive stages by wary exponents of European art criticism. In the essays the most recurrent reference points are Bosch and Ensor. No quarrel with that, of course. However, I would add Pieter Bruegel the Elder, but not because Simeoni drew an expressive approach from him, but because he felt a spiritual affinity, a similar Weltanschaung. Actually Bosch's demonic symbolisms as well as Ensor's hopeless satire are alien to Simeoni, who leans towards irony full of hints. This is a necessary clarification in order to understand Simeoni's work correctly, but all this does not explain the language of the artist who is completely autonomous and separate from the conditionings and legacies of other artists. Indeed, every artist chooses his ideal universe, based on his own tastes and aspirations; Simeoni incited by incomprehensible interior reasons has been attracted by the Flemish universe. As Bruegel was influenced by southern landscape at first, Simeoni has been captured by the glamour of northern geography. This fact is easily understood if we consider Simeoni's Venetian origins. The Venetian non-expressed state of anxiety leads to ideal escape to northern or central European countries or to the Slavic world, which seems to be an ancestral call of the places of the primitive settlings : the history of the arts is rich in similar examples. The above considerations are not extensive, but they are sufficient to present Simeoni's work, which is qualified only in relationship with language quality and the incidence of the message itself. In painting after painting Corrado Simeoni shows a great crowd of faces well characterized from the psychological point of view and involved in a social establishment excluded from any rational strength : it is a pre-illuminist approach or an approach forgetful of the balance caused by illuminist concepts. Observers are shown people riveted in crazy inertness, frozen in a psychic condition which prevents any possible form of conscious organization and, consequently, any conscious manifestation of defence or protest as well. Such condition leads, on the other hand, to the breaking out of primordial or even beastly impulses. Frans Duister calls that, very acutely, a "monster with a thousand heads". That monster shares the most dissimilar and alarming physionogmies; some are caught in a sort of eager and morbid steadiness, others in a stupid smile and still others are full of idiotic mistrust, irritating cheerfulness or unrestrained disapproval. Psychic distortions are reinforced by somatic deformities, i.e. by hooked or snub noses, by exaggerated protruding or scanty cheek-bones, sometimes by mouths thin as slits, then other times by mouths large as snouts. This is an almost inexhaustible inventory that the artist polishes up to create figures of emblematic content thanks to his thin psychologic intuition and to his miniaturist zeal. When sometimes these characters are masked, the image temperature rises and passes over the damnation boundary, while the promiscuity between reality and fiction, between existence and farce moves the index of grotesque to the pole of tragedy, which is a premonition of imminent catastrophe. But where are these creatures coming from ? Perhaps they come from a metropolis underground, or from lost villages and certainly from rural and urban Corti dei Miracoli which defy the time of the so called super technological civilization. Like dogs they recognize each other by their smell, they join and multiply becoming the mass, that is the thousand-headed monster, which is acephalous, blind and shapeless, but full of terrifying influence. Corrado Simeoni's themes are metaphors of a reality we bear witness to, but the modes of this pictorial research do not drag the painting into the narrow limits of moralistic justification or of sociological interest. Thanks to their pervading intellectual irony Simeoni's works reach the poetical transfiguration and are able to establish an immediate relationship with the observer. Getting in contact with the observer the painting steers clear of the danger of the contamination of the populistic, rhetoric and mannered piety. Finally, the fruition of the art allows the observer to think about his own responsibilities and about his own destiny, as well. Carlo Munari