The turning point was the encounter with a grey, smooth stone, veined with a thin white line discreetly emphasizing its shape. Around the stone flowed the fast running water of a mountain river, like freshly melted ice. With shades ranging from white to grey, and blue to pale ash-grey azure, the water surrounded the rock like a halo, its fluidity underlining coarse, stony solidity. Alessandro Vicario, un-distracted by the beautiful landscape of the Onsernone Valley, gets closer to “his” stone and takes a picture that is as precise as a slice of reality, and yet capable of letting emerge – as Antonio Ria writes – «poetically the ‘unstoppable transformation’ of nature, even in what we mistakenly call ‘still life’, and to show us the Apparent Immobility of the stone» (1). Struck by the beauty of many stones and pebbles lying in the watery bed of the Isorno River, Vicario even takes a particular stone home; he is attracted by the colours that shimmer between silver, pink and rust. However, a few days later, the author notes with disappointment that the hues in the stone, deprived of water, have turned darker and even taken on a dull layer of grey. It is not only the apparent immobility of the rock that has been sculpted by the unceasing flow of water, and Vicario discovers that colours are also so transformed. He is certainly not so naïve as to ignore that colours vary with changes of light; colours are not permanent elements of objects. Nevertheless, he feels that something is missing: he remembers the enchantment of the sounds of the woods, of grass moved by the wind; but most of all, he remembers the almost physical pleasure of the colours lighting up flowers and rocks, growing darker inside the woods or setting the sky on fire. Those colours have settled in his memory and cannot be forgotten. He then decides to photograph them, to bring them to life again through photography. This time, the focus would not be on objects, but simply upon colours presented to his vision with an endless profusion of chromatic shades and ever-new combinations, engaging him in an almost inexhaustible, endless research. Curiously, it is as if Vicario's artistic path wanted to follow that of Wolfgang von Goethe, the great German writer, who not only loved strolling through the woods of his Thuringia, but also often stopped to sketch the powerful shape of a rock, or a tree branch, or to pick up botanical samples and stones he then accurately catalogued. Goethe’s experiences in the middle of nature inspired the book that kept him occupied at least for as long as Faust, and for a long time he considered his most significant work: the Theory of Colours (Zur Farbenlehre, 1808). In the chapter Sensual and Moral Action of Colours, he writes «Colour occupies so important a place in the series of elementary phenomena, filling as it does the limited circle assigned to it with fullest variety. We therefore are not surprised to learn that it exercises special actions on the sight, to which it evidently belongs, and through sight on the soul and its more general elementary manifestations without referring to the constitution or the form of the material on the surface of which we see it. » (2). He notices thus that the spell of colour and the emotions caused are not based on the coloured objects but on the appearance instead, on the pure chromatic effect hovering lightly above things. It is the colour that triggers emotions, that makes one sad when it fades to grey and gladdens when it becomes luminous and bright again. Just as if he wanted to be in tune with Goethe's reflections, Vicario – in his research Chromatic Concepts – isolates colour. The natural forms that are the generators for these hues are not completely clear. It is left up to the viewer to imagine the shapes, to perhaps catch a glimpse of them here and there; but then the author conceals them again behind images that can be monochrome and vibrant like Phil Sims' paintings, bright and iridescent like a work by David Simpson, or even gloomy and filled with darkness. It is as if his images intentionally oscillate towards the very matter of nature and sometimes towards abstraction, persistently remaining in an ambiguous, suspended gap, open to the viewer's interpretation. Although they visually look like colour backgrounds, his images are merely formally, but not substantially close to the tradition of abstract photography, in which the image itself becomes the object of photography. In most cases, “true” abstract photography is not an abstraction of reality (as in the case with Vicario's Chromatic Concepts); it is instead the result of self-reflective, self-referential operations. Such work doesn't represent anything real, but presents only a process instead; not reproducing reality, abstract photography produces images only through light and experimentation with the very materials of the photographic craft. In Vicario's work it is clear instead that abstraction is not the result of “narcissistic” self-referred reflection on photography but quite the opposite; creation comes from the magic spell exerted by the colours of nature. If we were to find some “Masters” who have inspired him in this research, one should then look more to painters than to abstract photographers. Vicario himself tells us that his research was inspired, among other things, by a visit to the Villa Menafoglio Litta Panza which hosts the magnificent abstract works of the Panza di Biumo collection. When Vicario saw the large paintings by David Simpson, Phil Sims, Ruth Ann Fredenthal and Ettore Spalletti, he realised that a work of pure colour can communicate a great sense of intensity and infinity, and could evoke all the colours of the universe. Giuseppe Panza di Biumo himself writes about Sims' work: “One could talk long about each single colour. What do his blues express? The sea, the endless sky, the colour of a summer afternoon or that of the twilight before the sunset? Yellow is the colour of ripe wheat, a feeling of vital opulence, or delicate as a flower just bloomed and beginning to live” (4). If painting can so intensely evoke the colours of nature, what would happen if those colours, thanks to photography, were brought to life not by imitation, but as a direct trace? This seems to be the question Vicario asked himself. Driven by this question, the author photographs the colour of things, of flowers, stones, fields, trees, skies, creating monochromatic, faded images that don't just evoke the chromatics of nature, but are instead generated by them. Their luminous traces are modified and reinterpreted by the photographic device itself without other manipulations. That his artistic undertaking doesn't want to either just photographically emulate the works of the painters admired in the Panza collection, or turn into a beguiling journey through the colours of nature, is demonstrated by his choice of using for his image series one single format: a small and strictly square composition. Such a choice clearly shows us that his research is meant to be a perceptive inventory; such cataloguing is not intended to compete with painting. His work never drifts into symbolic suggestions nor implies any “artistic” or interpretative intervention: everything in it is unfolded in relationship with the specific condition of photography. Between “subjective” and “objective” photography, Vicario clearly chooses the latter. His spiritual father could be Karl Blossfeldt, who in his series Urformen der Kunst (1890-1930) reproduced one by one, at close distance and in the same light, almost six thousand plants, avoiding any empathetic trap. Just like it was for this historical author, for Vicario, too, photography's task is not to interpret, but to reveal. And within the boundaries of photography it is also his choice to add, under each image, a text indicating the exact time and place where the picture has been taken. Vicario underlines the “It was” mentioned by Roland Barthes when talking about photography. That “It was”, though, thanks to his text, loses any anachronistic vagueness and testifies of the exact moment, now past, when the photographer was there, looking at that flower in Berlin or at that plant in Arcegno. Such information, apparently fixing the images in unambiguous time, actually ends up highlighting and revealing their intrinsically paradoxical temporal condition. Without that text telling us that “this is a photo”, we would have seen in Vicario's work only a collection of beguiling, evocative images, open to a sort of timeless infinity. But because they clearly present themselves as prints, they refer instead to a nuanced and complex time model, where the “Now” and the “It was”, the instant and eternity coexist. And it is just this two-faced paradoxical temporality that saves his pictures from a double risk: that of presenting themselves as mere documents of reality, and that of slipping towards the idealistic imitation of a painting tending to the Absolute.   1) Un’Onsernone. Stefano Spinelli Topografie affettive, Alessandro Vicario, Immobilità apparente, edited by Antonio Ria, ELR Edizioni Le Ricerche, Losone, 2008, p. 9. 2) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Theory of colours, chapter Sensual and moral action of colours.   3) La collezione Panza. Villa Menafoglio Litta Panza – Varese, text by Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, Skira, Ginevra - Milan, 2002, p. 22.