Claudio Parmiggiani creates paintings of the mind, conceived more than executed, as acts of knowledge and, as such, as processes of abstraction. In Studioso in lettura (Scholar Reading), 1969, the attentive glance of the old sage falls on a large terrestrial globe, an image completely unknowable for those within it, but knowable by way of abstraction for those who can project their gaze, from above, over the totality that contains them. Parmiggiani’s approach is one that one might call Plotinian, or Neo-Platonic, because of its movement through concatenations, from one image to another, within a scheme that descends from and returns, from and to the realm of ideas. [...]
