So, what is the journey of the drop? According to Élisée Reclus, “[…] our gaze is not broad enough to embrace the entire circuit of the drop, and we limit ourselves to following it in its turns and leaps, from when it appears at the spring until it blends with the water of the great river or the ocean.” The Ground Water project by the artist Andreco (Rome, 1978) springs precisely from this statement’s source: following the path of waters where they disappear from our sight and go underground, opening cavernous furrows. For this reason, water, its flow, its physical characteristics, even its (non) color have disappeared from the representations that fill the large canvases. They are presences in their absence, gaps that are able to speak of what generated them, attempts at tracing the boundaries of the void, they are vacuum forms. Afterall, in underground cavities, “vacuum” resonates with “aqueous,” and it is precisely the water basins, regardless of their size, that constitute the most powerful force shaping the earth’s skin. Streams, rivulets, channels, brooks, and even rivers flow beneath the earth’s crust and in its depths, creating unreachable places where sometimes life develops. Giuseppe Penone wrote in 1980: “The two perfects, totality of the image, the fluid and the solid in the slow flow of waters, produce sculpture. […] The river has a marvelous agility, its flow is continuous, insistent, methodical, tactile, and eternal. […] The river carries the mountain, it is the vehicle of the mountain.”

When the water vanishes, what is left? The best-known calcareous concretions formed following the loss of carbon dioxide from the surface of water drops are stalactites. They also appear as plastic forms, the result of a sculptural process; they can relate to statuary when they rise like inverted obelisks or stand out as pinnacles; they can even resemble architectural elements when, in karst caves, they reach the floor like columns in a nave. The colors characterizing the hollow caves where the aqueous residues flow forcefully enter the artist’s palette, from iron oxides to earth tones, from sulfates to carbonates, to the bright mineral opacities. The rocky elements permeating the painted compositions emanate a striking centripetal force: like diaphragms, they narrow, focusing toward the center of the painting, toward the snowy whiteness, the space left by the water. Evaporating liquids, settling residues, chemical reactions, and state changes describe the transformations of natural elements with the alchemist’s wonder. Nature, told through symbols, regains a central role in public discourse, not only as an environmental emergency but as an active part of the life flow even in the present. Remote places, explored following the water’s path, can be defined more as inner than interior because even time in them assumes geological proportions. It is not the speed of a liquid flowing in a conduit that dictates the rhythm in the caves serving as the backdrop, but rather the measured pace of a drop fixed in the moment when, having reached the water’s edge, it is about to dissolve. It is the same drop from which the cycle began, carrying on itself the edges of the rock, the memory of the path traveled, the traces that water and earth have mutually exchanged.