A versatile artist, he has always been extremely natural, from painting to sculpture, from etching to etching, from printing to collage, letting himself be attracted by the most disparate materials. Nobody excludes them a priori. He searches for them, examines them, squeezes them thoughtfully between his fingers, overwhelmed by the contact in an imperceptible dialogue with them, and then inserts them into his paintings that become fascinatingly material. Steel hemp threads, gauze, pigments, sand and glassy bodies caress the underlying design giving it thickness, as if to cancel the border between painting and sculpture. And sometimes, looking at his sculptures, one is forced to question the material of which they are made, so is his talent in patinating the bronze to make it look like ceramics.

A continuous research and experimentation that fascinates him and entertains him like a game every time new, but that is a good fifty years ago. And if Antoine de Saint Exupéry claimed that “all adults were first of all children (but only some remember it)”, the works of Nocera was. As I create, in fact, distant memories resurface in his mind: the fairy tales heard in front of the fireplace while it was raining outside, the various characters that in his imagination came to life like shadows on the walls, the theaters seen in the streets of Naples, laughter and shouts the men of the books among the school desks, the long journeys completed later in search of themselves, the loves and passions, the news stories that every day tell a humanity that has forgotten the meaning of life.

Memories and sensations that he translates into decisive strokes, in gestural strokes, in merciless casting, in stains of color now dim or gloomy, in exasperated jumps, in progress, frantic or graceful in which his characters, painted or sculpted, seem perpetually engaged. “Her women”, then, now posing, delicate and elegant as muses or goddesses, now mighty come trees on which small birds ask for shelter, are born in a silence able to arouse a great noise. In reality, the urgency of respect for life is screaming. And when a look in ecstasy, enveloped in a whirlwind of flying butterflies, proclaim the right of every man to freedom, not least that of dreaming. Antonio Nocera, therefore, with his art reveals us his “Emotions”, and he does so with the precise intent of arousing ours.