How many trees make a forest? This is a question the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset attempted to answer in his remarkable Meditations on Quixote. While the question may appear trite, it actually defies any definitive answer. After all, the forest is a reality that eludes our gaze; it is not composed of the trees we see, but, if anything, of those we do not. In fact, the forest always exists a bit beyond the place where we stand. It is a mere possibility. And yet we know what a forest is, and we understand we are in the middle of one, when the trees in front of us hide other trees: when we realize that the visible landscape is concealing other invisible landscapes. As Ortega y Gasset puts it, “One cannot see the forest for the trees, and it is due to this fact that the forest exists.” The theme developed by the Spanish philosopher, and which Antonio Sannino explores in his painting, is the relationship between surface and depth and, in general, the question of visibility. By painting some trees crowding the perimeter of the canvas, Sannino captures the depth of the forest behind, that is, he allows the depth (the forest) to be hidden behind the surface (the trees) and thus paradoxically to be made manifest by them, in perfect material and spiritual harmony. Ortega y Gasset further explains that “Just as depth needs a surface beneath which to be concealed, the surface or outer cover, in order to do so, needs something over which to spread, covering it.” It is precisely in the inextricable surface–depth hendiadys that the miracle of visibility materialises, and it happens through colour. It is not the shape of a birch, even though compressed in space, that reveals the essence of the forest by hiding it; instead, the surface depth is suggested by colours, spread almost in the manner of the Informal to allow the aluminium support to show through, its luminous surface appearing extraordinarily deep.
