Campano's exploded like a whirlpool of colour and gesture in the early eighties with the series "Las vocales" (originally called "Les voyelles", inspired by Rimbaud's poem of the same name). After a training period in which the legacy of a constructive and even normative art had a decisive effect, he opened up to visions which were more in tune with his turbulent, emotional temperament. He made connections both with European informalism and American Abstract Expressionism. However, he was looking for a way of catalysing the energy and gestural quality of painting through a formula that combined translation and inspiration from Rimbaud's most radical and alchemical poetic expression in Les voyelles . The sonnet, which marked a break with and a transgression of poetic language, founded the contemporary gaze and poetic language from a new way of understanding metaphor which goes beyond synaesthesia. Campano turned to Rimbaud and used painting as means of establishing a radical cut on which his own gaze can rest: a place where the legacy of a particular tradition of renewal converges with his own determination to make a break and go on from there to affirm a way of painting.
Mistral I is clearly set in the context opened up by "Les voyelles", but it is also part of an urge to use landscape to recover the freshness of plein air painting, which also leads to a reflection on nature. Campano did this painting at a time when Cézanne and his landscapes of Mont Sainte-Victoire had become another reference point for him whilst discovering the landscape of Provence. Mistral I is the Provence he sees and looks at, a metaphorical language of painting, as synaesthetic as Rimbaud's poem, in which gestures and colour become tropes for listening to and perceiving the wind, the sounds of the trees or the flat depth of the quivering leaves and bushes. Energy and lyricism blend in a setting in which echoes of Robert Motherwell converge almost silently with echoes of Albert Ràfols-Casamada.
