Il tempo è degli uomini” is the first line of a poem by Giovanni Profumo, It is one of the many passages in the artist's letters and writings in which he denies or makes fun of the human need to mark or calculate the passing of time. There are several examples which range from a playful to a more serious tone. In a letter to his daughter, Monica, instead of the date he writes “data (ma non concessa)”(given but not granted)** and then he goes on” if you think (but, do you ? do you think?) that you're coming to Genoa on the 31st of this month (Ah! Ah! Ah!)...”
In a letter to author Giorgio Calcagno he better explains: “I hardly believe in time because, as I firmly believe in eternity, I declare, as others have done, that time is so short as to be very, very close (in a mathematical sense) to absolute zero. Unfortunately, the fact that I have to live inside it is conclusive and also slightly negative”. Keeping faith with this idea, Profumo never dated a single letter, poem, text or painting during his forty-year-long activity as a painter. Could this represent the worst possible nightmare for an art historian: how to study, how to plan the catalogue of an artist who deliberately and systematically opposes the organization of human actions along a temporal line? As a matter of fact this impossible search for infinity is a programmatic statement, a poetic declaration which agrees perfectly with his painting. It is from the conflict between the contact with the casual concreteness of circumstances and his need to aim at the ideal essence beyond those circumstances that his creative process starts.
Profumo's artistic journey is the search ─ interiorly motivated and autonomous, often solitary if not isolated ─ for a sacredness aiming at the absolute, at timelessness. As a post-romantic he is aware of how narrow the boundary can be between the sublime and the ridiculous and he always proceeds, with lucid irony, to study that boundary in order to reveal its inherent poetry. Such sensibility finds its fullest expression in the last decade of his activity when his paintings, reduced to monochrome, the zero degree of painting, become visible fragments of a luminous, uninterrupted whole. At the same time their reduced size, the evidence of every stroke of the spatula and of the furrows left by every single hair of the brush, always bring the observer back to the everyday, but also lyrical, reality of the here and now: of the colour spread on the canvas, of the room you are in and of the meridian beam from the window behind you, playing with the furrow of a brush left by the small, carefully-measured gesture of the artist.

* time is a human conception
**(NDT. a pun on the word “data”, which in Italian means both date and given);