…A dialectical tension animates the life of a masterpiece in an “eccentric path” which never tends toward the recomposition of contrasts; rather, it lets them live within a higher bond towards a different and superior destination. «Through a higher unity – says Novalis – the artist achieves a concentration of various trades and these, through such higher concentration, acquire a higher meaning». When the painter, victorious and tenacious, operates upon the volumes, the bodies, the colours, then his connection to the old becomes present and effective; then we understand how the novelty of the ancient is the antiquity of the new; then we become aware of the unbroken continuity of time. This is precisely the horizon of Salvatore Fiume’s metaphysical painting where novelty, proposal, and hope keep originating from the living metamorphosis of the old. Thus the artist, in his own words, «can run backwards: run on the wake of time past ». If, as Benjamin states, «antiquity only exists where a creative spirit recognizes it», then Fiume’s poetics of the Hypotheses represents the paradigm of an intelligent dialogue between past and present articulated within a lively and persistent dialectical relationship between intuition and reflection, between the reception-perception of meaning and the foundation of new myths for the present. Is this, then, romantic art? Is this, to paraphrase a famous definition by Friedrich. Schlegel with reference to poetry, “Painting of painting”? Of course, romanticism is “romanticization”, a progressive movement of forms and meaning constantly being defined; yet, in Fiume reflection is always led by intuition, which is the deep and living study of the old and at the same time the identification of a new antiquity; which, in turn, is the formed-form and the forming-form of art’s and history’s time. Thus, Fiume’s painting represents the extraordinary sense of a complex, articulated, manifold, and profound modernity. It is, no doubt, an “educated” painting, voted to a genuine worship of forms, yet, at the same time, pregnant with an authentic power of myth-creation. And therefore, the inclusion of classical elements is no mere ornamental citation, nor just a form of mannerism; indeed it is the composition of living material within the warp and fabric of the history of soul. This is how the Hypotheses take shape: witnesses to a new and bewildering contemporariness of masterpieces. In his hypothesis the artist’s consciousness becomes awareness of the living time and thus an example of a possibility, perhaps of the highest one: the possibility of dialogue among times within time, among spaces within space, the amazing discovery of the eternal simultaneousness of artworks. «It is not news – says Fiume – that compared to the incalculable immensity of time, a few thousand years is equal to a few seconds». And therefore the eternal becomes the new and the hypothesis becomes the modern form of a new mythology. If, as the painter recognizes, «great artworks must have been begotten by great hypotheses», and if «every artwork is the materialization of a hypothesis», then the hypothesis is itself the imprint of a total artwork, the ineffaceable trace of a new language of the origins, in which the essence of a grand style, the essence of the “classic”, finds its foundation…