The bridge

The bridge acrylic spray on canvas 300×200 cm – 2016

In 2016, travelling from Milan towards DutyGorn’s studio in Torrazza Coste, there came a point when the city slowly began to lose its presence. Buildings grew fewer, the horizon stretched wider, and the landscape opened into the plains. It was a journey the artist made regularly, sometimes twice in the same day. Always the same road, yet never quite the same journey.

At a certain point, he reached the Po. Ahead stood the bridge, an imposing structure crossing the river that, for a few moments, seemed to suspend everything else around it. It was from this recurring vision that The Bridge emerged. Not from a desire to depict a landscape, but from the need to preserve what remained in memory after passing through the same place hundreds of times.

Looking at the work meant entering that journey. The bridge dominated the composition like a vast horizontal architecture, while the green, unusual within DutyGorn’s work, evoked the expanse of the Po Valley. Blue and light blue became the Po itself, no longer depicted as a recognisable river but transformed into fields of colour, depth and passage.

Then came the lines. They ran, broke apart and changed direction. They were the road, but also the lights, the speed and that almost Futurist sensation born from watching the landscape rush past. There was the train crossing the plains, perceived more as movement than as an object; there was the railway crossing and, on the left, its sign, reduced to a mark and absorbed into the structure of the painting. Every element came from something actually seen, crossed and repeated.

It was here that the Polyeclectic language began to change its nature. Geometry was no longer simply a construction of space, and the line was no longer merely an element within the composition: both became memory. Road, bridge, water, railway, signs and light were removed from their everyday functions and recomposed as coordinates of a personal experience.

The Bridge thus told the story of a journey without illustrating it. It did not simply show what the artist had seen, but what remained after seeing it every day. It became a mental geography built through speed, colour and repetition, where Futurism and the Polyeclectic language seemed to meet naturally: the landscape no longer stood still before the eyes, it passed through the artist.

And perhaps this was the true meaning of the bridge. Not simply an architecture connecting two banks, but that brief suspended space between a place being left behind and another one being approached. Milan behind him, the studio ahead. In between, the Po, the plains and all those signs that, journey after journey, had become memory.