In labyrinths of coral caves / The echo of a distant time / Comes willowing across the sand / And everything is green and submarine / And no one showed us to the land / And no one knows the where's or why's / Something stirs and something tries / Starts to climb toward the light. (Pink Floyd,Echoes, 1971) Claudio Valerio seeks a return to the source of painting without finding it, he seems to indicate the way but must stop and demonstrate its impossibility. And this happens not because of a subjective incapacity but because any return to the origin is impossible. This has moved, indeed, it is constantly moving, like an unstable although probable pole of the earth. The post-modern, and above all post-post-modern, ontological dimension is a search for impurity, for what does not have the clarity of its origin. Valerio's dark painting, deep black like dark matter that permeates the universe, it is a mirror that does not reflect because it opacifies the image to be transmitted, makes it something else, spurious, different. The mirror never told the truth, let's not delude ourselves. To paint in an informally minimal way means to relate to the zero degree of painting which is the source of meaning from nothing. Reality is no longer sufficient because it is impossible to look at, it does not allow reflections. The ghost of painting wanders around contemporary art as an ever-present threat, as an absent form that is ready to manifest and disappear like images in the maleolent cauldron of the witches of Macbeth. Black is a non-color that absorbs the energy around itself, at the bottom of which there can be the Nothing or the Absolute depending on the mood or the research paradigm. Luca Campestri absolutizes the experience of the subject as something that has the will to go beyond. The phantom of freedom or the freedom of the phantom lies in its exceeding matter and becoming something else, for example as an expression of energy that appears as sound. It is this that is reintroduced into the Universe at the death of the images. “Animula vagula blandula” are the last words attributed to the dying emperor Hadrian. Ghosts wander even those generated by artists: they cannot sit still because it is not in their nature. They don't belong to anyone, they have no owners. These rigorous and perfectly elliptical videos by Campestri have the will to spread themselves, transforming themselves into energy, they are digital cells that constitute the background noise of life, which transcends itself continuously, infinitely.