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Nota critica di Paolo Capelletti
Il miracolo della forma, miracolo ontologico, è un farsi, uno spiegarsi tanto ininterrotto quanto meticoloso. Formarsi è farsi da sé, crescere, realizzarsi. Nell’illusione che il Reale esista, la realtà si forma, si informa. Diventare forma, lasciare che il miracolo si compia attraverso il proprio divenire, è una questione di tratteggi, di abbozzi. Delicate fragilità si agitano, irrequiete, timorose di essere rotte, come entrare dopo tanto tempo in una profonda lettura e temere di interrompersi; esattamente come posare piede in una stanza scarsamente illuminata e accorgersi all’ultimo istante che un nostro caro amico si è addormentato, arrestare perfino il respiro per non sgretolare l’attimo. Davanti a queste delicatezze, a questi innocenti pudori, lo sguardo non sa sopportare il peso della forma che ha appena accolto, si sente in colpa lui per primo, la colpa pura, quella senza oggetto, quella che fa volgere gli occhi sempre altrove quando scopriamo di essere guardati, visti.
Quando le forme di Antonio Haupala si spiegano, silenziose e pacifiche ma tutt’altro che beate – angeli sì, ma della terra –, sono i loro sguardi a tradire la loro essenza. C’è un’assenza di sguardi che, tuttavia, non è un di meno di presenza, come se stando al di là, al di sopra del mondo, non ci fosse più bisogno di vedere, solo di contemplare l’eternità; no, al contrario, quegli sguardi abbassati, distolti, sono quanto di più attuale e quotidiano, vergognoso e, perciò, incarnato, si possa chiedere a queste figure. Niente le può convincere a fissare lo sguardo nel nostro, esse sanno già da sempre che noi, irriverenti e presuntuosi, stiamo qui a fissarle e ci rispondono con la loro ritrosia, apparentemente remissiva ma, in realtà, risposta perentoria: «Anche voi siete visti!».
Fatto questo patto di mutua vulnerabilità, di reciproca visibilità, accettiamo di entrare silenziosamente nel mondo delle forme e ne siamo abbracciati: un’accoglienza calorosa in quanto silente, uno stare tra simili che non ha bisogno di essere spiegato, solo del proprio spiegarsi, svolgersi, formarsi. E affondiamo nel tepore di questo Tramonto sul Mincio, lo sentiamo sulla pelle, inconfondibile e familiare come l’aroma del Tè, così intimo, aspetta due e due soltanto, noi. Del resto, è ciò che ci insegna l’atmosfera in cui siamo penetrati, la forma genuina non è artificiosa o ricercata e questo, lungi dall’essere un cedimento verso il troppo facile o il poco prezioso, è il vero segreto rivelato dalla forma che si fa: non c’è una realtà superiore a un’altra, nessun mondo perfetto da costruire, piuttosto tanti mondi da scoprire. Solo guardandoli, e non è un coraggio da poco, mentre si fanno. E allora, ben consci del tempo che ci scorre tra le dita ma senza concedergli l’onore di preoccuparcene, possiamo finalmente stare, restare a guardare. Senza parole, perché non è di quelle che le forme si fanno, che le vite di queste figure accadono. L’invito che abbiamo ricevuto è ad assaggiare questi frammenti di vitalità morbida; a scostare la tenda e a entrare a far parte. Non siamo qui per intervistare, perciò tacciamo, tacciono loro. Non si spiega lo spiegamento delle forme.
Laddove, nella stasi, non ci sono ansia e premura e, tuttavia, il mondo è tutt’altro che scomparso e dimenticato, proprio là si fanno raggiungere le forme di Antonio Haupala. Un libro, la cura delle piante, scrutare il cielo; gesti che potrebbero suggerirci la loro stanchezza ma, non inganniamoci, non sono rassegnati, non sono meno determinati. Il loro accadere è il puro avvenire, presi mano nella mano come in un Girotondo, si accompagnano e ci accompagnano. Nella pazienza di queste figure c’è tutta la loro forza, in essa si esprime tutta la loro accoglienza; l’attitudine di chi – da perfetto ospite – conosce ciò che lo circonda, vi appartiene completamente e quindi lo possiede e ce ne fa dono, offerta impagabile perché nessun pagamento è richiesto: solo partecipazione. Partecipazione a un mondo, a tanti mondi, raramente nostri, forse impossibili, certamente inestimabili.
Paolo Capelletti
25 gennaio 2012
Critical note of Fabrizio Migliorati
The balanced and persisting solitude in the
paintings of Antonio Haupala
There is a "minus", presence is hardly overbearing: images pay the cost of the dynamics. A farmer with his sickle, a woman floodlit by the sunlight offers an immaculate life wraped up in motherhood., Anita plays guitar from which no sound seems to come out. The silence advises us of a necessary caution while approaching these works: voiceless works that are exciting and still relaxing. Images of everyday life, to be intended in its abounding banality and in its relationship with the deepest eschatological purposes. 
Everyday life is often bustling with household duties or going on an errand. A humble life. The opposite to this logic is the enterprise, that is a busy man with many things to do, to choose, tending towards new challenges and adventures. The enterprise is against the way we commonly consider everyday life, it suggests much more activity; man causes his own destiny, he does not wait (there is nothing wrong in waiting). Haupala's works show a daily life that is placed between the mentioned ones (everyday life-enterprise), but doesn't join the conversation. It is a life interposed "between" and not inserted "with". In the paintings there is both an endogenous and exogenous resistence to dialogue. These works are impossible to provoke but are deeply open: pure offering gesture. We should gently approach to these works with respect and, notwithstanding the persistent will to autopay of mankind, they hold out against any anatomy. From dialogue we pass to contemplation. Even the persons in the paintings do resist to the inner comunication. They are not real characters but images inside the paintings without a full presence. An incomplete presence, a resistence made of stubborn and stony silence. Each represented person do not look at us and neither towards other bystanders in the picture. They don't look at each other because each of their lives leads, together with their glances, elsewhere. The characters resist against any kind of dialogue and at the same time they loose quietly their consistence. The "girls at the river" (ragazze al fiume) are monads, "self-referential", standing near one another but not really friendly. Their bodies change and flesh seems to crystallize, sticking for the last time, for the very last moment. They are at the treshhold of objectivity. Painted figures are even more depicted, becoming decorations of "Chinese teapots"(teire cinesi).
It doesn't matter whether or not oriental. They are figures inside the figure, painted on the canvas and there they must stay, remaining themselves in spite of everything. Here, the lack of presence reaches his apex because presence fades away, it hardens into a porcelain teapot. All images painted by our artist have the peculiarity to move to this kind of objectivness, a "withdrawal of person". Although, the fact of becoming objects or, better to say, the possibility of a transformation is far from being a threat. There is only the wonderful freedom to let yourself go, allowing your body to turn in something else and never to become obscene.The body flows lost, hardening or fading away by a whiff. 
Inspiration always belongs to the language of art and it marks preeminently its creative moment and feeling, the instant that creates the work of art. According to this purpose, a god instills a thought into someone's mind, an affection, so he becomes a conscious translater of this power. But inspiration is also a physiological moment that consists in breathing, in acquisition of energy: a long breath that fullfills our lungs from where an explosive instant follows, the ejection, the expiration. Haupala's works are placed at the end of this act of "inspiration", when the body, full of oxygen, stays trembling suspended until the last moment. The breath reaches its climax, pathos is suspended. An incalculable instant that fades away when we try to keep it, to hold it up.
A free translation from Fabrizio Migliorati's work about the exhibition of Antonio Haupala in Medole (MN), May 29, 2011
Critical note of Floriano De Santi
the plots of the "lost time" in Antonio Haupala's work
I.
The main idea that guides Antonio Haupala’s painting is to take back the image to a vital intensity and intimacy that privilege the essential. But this happens in an expressive and equally “decorative” way — with small parts that vibrate on many scenes and on figures that are unquestionably feminine, with warm and suffused colours, and with musical and persuasive shadings — and that doesn’t deny the Erfahrung, the symbolist experience, but takes it to a form that, just because it wants to dissolve in a colour-rhythm, which is nearer to the contemplative idea of the artist, gives life to a silhouette in which every red or green or yellow colour extends in calibrated chromatic scores, setting a particular spatial position in the painting. 
It’s a path that takes us back to our central European tradition and to a representation that is mindful of what happened in the artistic field between the nineteenth and the twentieth century. Obviously, Haupala is a contemporary painter. But this twofold and maybe contradictory stylistic feature — to be modern and to remember the past, to have spent the adolescence in Asia and also have Asiatic origins can appear very Italian- joins with a special conception of the definition of the pictorial atmospheres, that allows even Haupala’s oriental palette (the one, to be clear, of some oil-paintings like Yasodhara and Siddharta, and The smoking Woman) to remain inside the pictorial dictation, which is very far from the picturesque one. Haupala establishes comparisons between absolutes, the Lieblicher Blaue — to quote Holderlin — or other figurative essences, the space-structure on one hand and the human figures on the other hand, without ever exceeding that realism which, on the contrary, Matisse candidly broke, and he consecrates numen lumen evanescence. Haupala’s determinations, which are of an aesthetic-constructive and not empirical kind, real plastic elaborations of the observation through isolation and of the exaltation of the specific formal qualities, are at the base of many lyrical effects that derive just from the reduction of the indicative element for its mere memory vibration. In short, Haupala frames the iconic suggestions in thematic and semantic stations that concern essentially women experiences (The acrobats, The tailors, The cooks, The two friends, The game of draughts, The magician). These experiences are anyway translated, by lighting and polychrome derivations, in a kind of field, which is perceptive of greater depths. The artist creates real figural suites in which everything musically changes but at the same time everything remains intact. The decorative outlines, the continuous purifications of the figurative nucleus, the contrasts of light and shadow, the perspective diagonals or repoussoir, whose compositive fiction is very near to the illusion of depth, the vertical strokes that mark the surface, or the coulisses that have the task of putting the view right in the centre concentrating here the feeling, the schemes, even metaphorical, on which is based a big system of compositional connections, are some of the Haupala’s elements of the paysage de style. They realize a kind of transcendence of the daily occurrence through the study of the happenings and of the luminous contrasts, of the shapes and of the surfaces: sometimes even renouncing to a strong drawing structure in order to leave space to the “significant colour”.
II.
The most diffuse and refined richness of feelings, like the most intelligent understanding of the new stylistic principles, can be expressed in the measure of an anecdote, apparently reduced, of a seen thing, of a fable. To the allegoric compositions, full of messages and programs, Haupala prefers and substitutes the simple images of an affectionate and silent chronicle. To the elaborate and external rhythms, to the esoteric and ingenuous arabesques, to the dry purism that the excited post moderns deduce from the works of Ranson and of Puvis de Chavennes, he opposes a language which is equally sophisticated but which has a much different sharpness and measure, and which is regulated by a poetic syntax that is extremely careful to respect the main values of the painting. In the frames of 2002, The Woman With the beret and The silk shawl, Haupala starts from the direct observation, from the barest and most sincere emotion, and transmits it with the most rarefied cleanliness, with very cultured formal plays, but his aim is to sharpen its meaning of feelings, to make clear his own personal subtle opinion of that image. And when the following year, with The great spectacle and with Night pastimes, he puts us on the way of the decorative arabesque or of the sinuous outline, of the modern style, he does it openly, also smiling for the specious theoretical justifications of many artists of his generation, and indulges completely in the curly and intense grace of more datable manner. I t’s known how much important were, in Hauapala’s culture, the maladive sensibility of Verlain, the crystal-clear language of Proust and 
the open measured clearness of Bonnard and of Vuillard. It should be also mentioned a short influence of the anguished poetry, of the psychological anxiety and of the erotic torment of the northerners. Starting from paintings like The glasses cleaning and Sharazad it’s possible to catch some links with certain hallucinated images of Munch; but they are not more than allusions, parenthesis, but are indicative, anyway, of the complexity of the artist inspiration, of his careful sharing the interests of his time. In the more recent works- from Evening thoughts to The awakening and to Alessandra in the veranda- the intensity and the tone of the colours change, but Haupala’s creative works are always arranged according to a rare and remarkable tonal undulation, based on suggestions of real light, and to the search for a language of correspondences de formes. Now objects and shapes are created in a pearly substance, of a dim light ( The atelier), now, instead, they are scanned by an arduous game of strong and opposite colours, of acrimonious and careful counterpoints ( Now I go out! ). The nuance and the more intense juxtaposition alternate and merge; every thing, every environment, every gesture, is found in the duration of feeling: there is, in these images, the theme of the “time lost” by Proust.
Floriano De Santi - 2004