Excerpt from the critique of Prof. Stefano Andreani for the exposition “Plenitude of the Substances” held at the “Casa de la America Latina” in Rome, Italy, in 1968. Published in the catalog of the sample and translated into English for this site.

Often they said that when the "rhetoric history" of a painter was made, that in his beginnings he was figurative.

We should not be surprised: the capacity of portrait, the desire of "doing justice to the eye", is for the buyer and for the critic and insurer element, and also a tranquilizer. One thing would be to say: his work is a chromatic impasting when it is known for his naturalistic practice. Another thing would be to say: he reveals the incapacity to express following a dull reproductive symbolism (the perspective for instance).

But Dante Crosa, who does everything except chromatic impastings, the figure is in every beginning, as the ritual garment of Medea. He will slowly be freed from it, because in the figure has been introduced accurately with precision tones and ordered composition, all this pointing to delimit and to indicate, point out the particular, to stop, perhaps in a naive way, the aggressiveness.

We say aggressiveness because the attention to the reality, the care in the picture elements are more sychologist than pictorial elements. The painter defends himself from the reality absorbing it completely; and redefines it in a different universe, that of the drawing, in which limited boundaries tranquilize and satisfy him.

The crisis of the figurative is then, in all painters, the moment of the truth. Will he be able to retreat over himself and do a chromatic phenomenology or continue observing and reproducing the real in a free and ludic way. Crosa, luckily, has chosen this second method.

In this exposition in Rome, his first personal at the Eternal City, we can observe the conclusions, by the moment, we think of a long work. The matter has became a primogenia matrix, a new formulation or proposal and a new way to picture the real.

Stefano Andreani
Rome, July 1968

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Excerpt from the critique of Prof. Carlos Sanchez Fuenmayor to the exposition “Cosmodiatole” held at the Culture Secretariat of Zulia State, Venezuela, May 1991. Some of the works can be observed in Gallery 1, translated into English for this site.

Dante Crosa paints with and open heart in cosmic harmony. In each of his paintings there is a natural environment from other places, remote waters, other airs and other fires drawn with big conceptual rigor and painted with a fine poetic tone of a new universe.

In the orbit of a total abstraction, the Cosmodiastole from this plural painter is returned to three slopes in the extra-planetary life of the contemporariness: a lyric, recognized in the resonance of the tones; other realistic, put in the plastic gesture of the feeling of bits of creation and the other surreal, where the rhythmic and the coloristic meet directions of the visual route.

Dante offers a mark for a comprehensive ideology of the future that is not of fiction but of greatness; where the powerful spaces are a kind of radiography of the infinite. The artist paints with a force that overflows like any vitalist metaphor of the paint. To this abstract, there are comparisons of the neverending, like the paint seen from the consequent creation, which becomes the humanism that lives, and protagonists from below, from the earth, like a history for the living beings.

For this artist of Italian-Uruguayan roots, the Age of Cosmos has already come, which will pay cult to the life of the firmament, and to a feeling of work and creation where life bustles; life that lights from the existence that populates the plastic matter that marks the way of the art.

Carlos Sanchez Fuenmayor.
Maracaibo 1991
Published in the catalog of the sample