Fantasy is a territory where all those who want to loosen the everyday strain, even with a glancing thought, find a privileged haven. Each of us fosters in their inmost feelings comforting images belonging to their childhood or rather retrieved from a chest of bewilderment, which is always difficult to restore in its freshness and immediate purpose. Time changes feelings. As time passes, it pollutes both look and desire. One shall, for an instant, return to his childhood years and enjoy this dream within that precise scenery. However, as this possibility is often lacking, one needs to address to those who can still understand such need and express it throughout tales that are narrated without contamination. It is possible to achieve this result by relating closely to the masterpieces of artists who have been able to preserve the magic seed of innocence and wonder. Luca Dall’Olio belongs to this rare progeny of authors who are capable of triggering unexpected magic, visions of a world that is linked to everyone’s childhood, to daydreams that are pursued after the first scratch and from drawings of our imagination, rather than  given into by the coherence of a figure that has been created, with difficulty, from a pencil. Our visual suggestions were those evoked by Dall’Olio, those suggestions that we partially find within the pages of Alinari’s complex stories and even more in Salvo’s silent landscapes. However, in the first case, the scenery is invaded by characters who do not exist here and now (in Dall’Olio’s early paintings,  buildings were used as guide icons), whereas Salvo’s imaginary world does not exceed the magic border of the horizon of a possible landscape. Thus, it is easy to approach the artist from Brescia because his tale is within “eyeshot” and it produces even a bit of regret for the physical limit of the canvass that prevents the spectator from living from the inside, as the only and privileged main character. Indeed, no-one is to be met on the streets that leap over or surround the hills, on the grass lawns, on the accurately drawn ploughed fields. Were there no houses, suddenly coming out from the void like mushrooms, it would be a Paradise on earth, waiting for someone worth it who could inhabit them. So then? Have we been chosen, are we the fortunate ones, just like in the happy ending tales that are told to children to bring good luck? Now is the time to stop for a moment our interpretative enthusiasm, which has evoked the nostalgic childhood, and turn back, at least a little bit, to that part belonging to adulthood that tries to judge situations with more criticism distrusting those easy and patronising appearances. Therefore, we will try now to critically value the different types of landscapes suggested by Dall’Olio, hoping, if it will not be a secret, to find a key to interpreting his world and making it ours. We can divide his works into four sections plus one extra one. We shall start with the landscapes that are characterised by the sweetness of the slopes and the rhythmic arch of the trees preparing the delicate contact with the horizon. They are scattered with houses built on top of hills to overpower the valleys caressed by a coaxing light, by the rose shades of sweetness, as we can notice in “Existance is a dream” and in “With body and heart”, where the sea adds a contemplative sweetness and delicacy. The sun can be imagined in the reverberations of dawn and sunset, inside a reassuring timbre embrace. Let's go back to those red roofed constructions that display a special uneasiness: they do not have windows nor doors. They are empty, without people or sounds. They are, thus, an inaccessible place, just like saying that a dream shall be only a dream and stay beyond the frame of a picture. Then, in A Thing that is and is not  and in “Tell me of a new world”, in the background we find a castle with battlements. This makes you think of a privileged watching point and of the presence of an observer, who, nonetheless, cannot be seen, sheltered by the walls. This seems to be a world on which someone has cast a spell, freezing nature’s motions and things, in pretty much the same way in which the artist has held back for us this moment of unreachable bliss. We look, but we can’t, it’s like Tantalu’s torment. We hang them on our walls hoping to solve the puzzle of people disappearing and the lack of doors in the houses. An important feature on some of the canvasses is the presence of ancient ruins made essentially of Greek capitals and comforted by the presence of palm trees, as we can notice in Seething
memories… It’s clearly the sign of a story lived on those shores, or it may be the romantic transposition of imagination that likes to enrich the landscape with more features, as we can even see in Only the substance is needed and in Ideas that fulfill thought. A new series of works is characterised by a completely different landscape. For example in “Slice of heaven” there are different types of trees: the pine trees of the previous sequences have been substituted by fir trees inhabiting, no more the round quietness of the hills, but the bitter slopes of the mountains. However, the real change comes from the houses, which are full of windows and openings, while entrances have very wide ogive arches. At the front a fountain of a trough gushes, near by there is a small fence; the sky is ploughed through by pompous and reassuring clouds. The tale, thus, is enriched by new features, not everyone is joyful, but it reflects our way of looking the worries of childhood: the windows of the houses seem to be eyes and the arches seem to be wide open mouths that for an instant take us back to the old Dall’Olio, him who loved to put misterious faces guarding the threshold. Here faces are only imagined, perceived by the imagination of those who, in now distant times and in particularly difficult or fearful moments, were bound to find within things human or natural semblances. Tales had and still have these little reassuring implications that are used as warning for disobedient children. We, who are no more children, do not know how to behave when our author reproaches us. It may be useful to hide inside some picture, in “I cannot part myself from dreams”, where the eyeful buildings, towered by a red and blue oriental like dome, are opposite to a more reassuring castle and the fresh gush of a waterfall. The fantastic world of Luca Dall’Olio is made equal by a sky that all of a sudden becomes alive at night with a rotating moons, stellar globes, bright slipstreams that cross the horizon forming a curl of splendor. The scene is animated and is surrounded by magic and charm, thanks to the different shades that are used to lay out a heaven full of surprises. Our wishes are fulfilled with colours that fade into blue between the sky and the sea, split by sweet and multicoloured hills, silent towers and houses, the crowns of pine trees; purple in “Slice of Heaven” comes down from the infinite space catching by astonishment the waters that come to touch lightly those archeological objects found beneath the soft and milky vault in I like looking at you. The moments of union and astonishment multiply because Dall’Olio’s heavenly kaleidoscope erupts solutions that mix both timbre and emotional features that are able to constantly renew the spirit of a magical landscape. The only things missing are paintings full of houses animated by high-arched doors and ocular windows, that maybe were conceptually different from that sense of sweetness and mystery. Now we only need one more obvious comment, which refers to two paintings that apparently do not match with the arguments we have discussed so far. They are abstract and informal works in which fantasy gives way to fragments full of a consistent plot. The Labyrinth of love is a cellular deployment on top of a base marked within the blue: it really seems to be an microscopic investigation of a world that cannot be reached by the everyday eye, a new feeling from that of “Dream night” and from the other stellar elements drown in a hypothetical liquidity that underlines them. However, now we are hit by another attraction and a doubt: what if Dall’Olio, with this surprise, wanted to indicate us the road to a dream we may live by investigating deep inside reality? What if these clues were nothing but fragments of that sky populated by infinite types of astonishment? Would something change? No it wouldn’t. Nonetheless, it would be for us another invitation to investigate a world that belongs to us, that we happily possessed in the magic hours of cheerfulness and which Luca Dall’Olio now represents with his authoritative unavoidability of disclosure.