L’Occhio del Pensiero

He began wandering through the streets of his city, Milan, discovering an invisible universe materializing beneath our feet:

a newspaper page dissolved in a puddle, a plastic bag flattened by a scooter, a rusted manhole cover, a fragment of fabric soaked in fuel. Materials transformed by time, natural events, and chance — stripped of their original identity and reborn as irrational messages, creative representations in constant transformation.

This collection, entitled “The Eye of the Mind”, represented the most important and personal project of his life.

Distinct from his previous silkscreen works and from the artistic production that had brought him international recognition, this body of work marked a more intimate, symbolic, and introspective turning point. He devoted nearly twenty years to its development, continuing to refine it until the final years of his life, with the profound desire that other eyes might perceive these authentic, mysterious, and “forever unfinished” images.

For Amleto Dalla Costa, “The Eye of the Mind” was an open invitation to imagination — a place where the eye of the mind interprets images through one’s own history, memory, emotions, and personal sensitivity.

The artist observed them, discovered them, and preserved them in the memory of his camera, later printing them onto canvas in their original, unrepeatable form, free from any digital manipulation.

From the very beginning of the project, he photographed using a Canon EOS 5D Mark II with a 35mm f/1.4 lens, later transitioning to the Sony RX1R and Sony RX100 III — tools he carried with him everywhere, like a notebook, a travel companion, a silent “colleague” of vision.