Francesco Biamonti's L'Ange d'Avrigue: sketching a pictorial writing style

In L'angelo di Avrigue by Francesco Biamonti, the Ligurian landscape is the objective correlative of the vanishing of a particular civilization, the disappearance of a way of 'being in the world'. This complex and stylized landscape corresponds to an intimate geography: it is a reflection of the mind which is represented through pages drenched in light, through the variations of the day's luminosity, the chromatic nuances of sky and clouds observed in every moment of the day, from the pearly dawns till the starry evenings and the opaque nights.
L'angelo di Avrigue is not a novel on landscape but it is rather a landscape-novel, i.e. a novel in which the landscape is not just the subject matter of the narration but also an artistic style of writing that consists of a series of pictures and touches of colour. Just like an impressionist painter, Biamonti puts on his pages his palette of light and deep blue, bright yellow, velvety green-gray, intense and vibrant red. The result is a series of 'paintings' in which he deconstructs and fragments the landscape and then puts it back together into an image. In these paintings the anthropomorphized elements of the landscape become the expression of a cosmic continuum, a vital eternity that is denied to human beings. Light and wind, represented as eternal, are contrasted to human beings who are bound to disappear.
At the dawn of a postmodern world characterized by ontological questions, Biamonti's landscape leads to the realization of humanity's lack of certainty and precariousness. For Biamonti everything is transitory, passage, clandestinity, wandering: the only thing bound to stay is the light, represented as ethic and esthetic memory, spirit of the places that resist destruction and disfigurement.