There is no trick or deceit, perhaps a principle of magic or mere science accompanied by logic and a good amount of cunning and mastery. The creation of this work is dictated and deeply inspired by the artist admiration for the realistic, sometimes obscure, and pre-symphonic shapes made by the revolutionary artist Michelangelo Merisi. Everything is resumed of Caravaggio’s thought, criticism, denunciation, vision of reality seen in a new artistic and temporal key. What characterizes the sixteenth-century depictions, here we find ourselves within an advanced stage and philosophical vision, a space dotted with geometric figures, spiers and defined shapes that squashed the backdrop, lines and colors that create ambiguous faces and atmospheres, almost an apocalyptic incursion in the Renaissance scenario.
The painting is precise, cared for, in some aspects almost comic book, but always in complete communion with the philosophy of the art work, with the descriptive intention of the artist.
From the almost theatrical scene of Caravaggio, it moves to a wider, futuristic and multidimensional one with the resumption of the same principles as the sixteenth-century author.
The analysis of reality, common to the thought of the two artists, is not highlighted in this work through naturalistic representation, but overwhelmingly dominated by symbology.
The force relations between the two characters in the foreground are overturned by the scramble of the outrigger organized by the ‘baro’ on the right, which lands on the conscientious platform of his victory.
In Passeri’s art work the clandestine business depicted by Caravaggio transpires into an atypical space, where card play leaves room for logic, to a slimmer game that flows into the laws of physics, guaranteeing the fall of the young man’s defect.
Attention is also placed on clothes and fabrics, which are reproduced here as echoes of Merisi’s pictorial commitment.
The jackets, the over sleeves, the puffy trousers are replaced by damask mutes, colored dresses so adherent to look like a second skin.
The drapery effect is abandoned to give space to the graphic rendering of the epoch’s texture, with symbols and links to the original frame.
So the naive young man keeps the black striped black burgundy farsetto, and we find the young baroque silk damask vest, which has the young baro, in the foreground. Mutant beings, with no face and arms, masks in a theater of a non-dimension. Suspended in an atemporal space floating in the hilt, controlled by the presence of a face in the background, a ‘big brother’ who runs the game, it has already decided the fate, an unjust chaperon, a “baro”. His face, also repeated on the sides, takes on the features of a totem, a tribal god, ubiquitous.
In this case the figure of the “baro” in the background that we find in Caravaggio’s work too, is completely absorbed by the dimensional walls.
We could think of this work as a fantastic evolution of the human figure, always engaged in double play and low morality, in a nearly space-based frame with a Renaissance taste.