Allowing the gaze to be objective but also contemplative and direct, letting no distractions or sentiments interfere with the simple observation. The observer has before him the presence of the horizon and of its two halves: sky above, sea or snow below. Continue, meticulously recording the place and time where that horizon offered itself to the gaze, with all the atmospheric variations that were occurring at that very minute and in the course of time: cloud movements, streaks of sun, faraway downpours of rain approaching, then retreating, the faint rippling of waves and plays of light, now sky-blue, now grey-black, then rosy. Finally rendering what has been seen, in the form of an image that is rigorous and geometrical: a square, severed by the horizon line, accompanied by a caption just reporting the date and place where that pure example of reality occurred. Alessandro Vicario's images are the fruit of a real ascesis of vision: the reduction of one's subjectivity to a mere observing of that which is presented, which shows itself when the surfaces of the atmosphere and the sea come closer to each other. But the result of such an ascetic concentration of vision does not reduce the world to a cold formal composition. Quite the opposite, it reveals the unfathomable mystery of the world silently showing itself to us and hinting at the Invisible, at the Infinite looming beyond it. Vicario's “geometrical” eye is actually an extreme striving for the unimaginable - the absolute Beyond of sea depths and starry skies. A striving all the more tragic inasmuch as that Beyond is constantly elusive, forever wrapped in the Invisible, in the hereafter of every gaze. Vicario's images achieve this ultimate end: they show us the Infinite approaching us at the very instant in which it vanishes.
