The relationship between man and nature represents the deepest and most congenital incipit of history. The artist expresses this desire, perhaps innate, to describe, admire and dominate his surroundings through means such as painting. Observing a landscape by Massimo Turlinelli we notice how what is represented in the pictorial space is not totally revealed to the viewer: behind that image, apparently real, clear and complete, there seems to be something else. After all we see the countryside in its essentiality: green meadows, cypresses, pines and infinite skies, but there are also some elements that are destabilizing from a semiological point of view. By observing the pictorial fabric, we notice how the stroke is given with strong incisiveness thanks to the use of the polychrome pencil, a technique that has been unforgivably left on the margins of 'official' art. It is a sign that is always equal to itself, like a module based on the serial principle of reproducibility, whose historical roots can be found in the neo-impressionist pointillism of Signac and Seurat. In the dense weave, no element emerges individually, but is part of a sign system that forms a complex image, which only acquires meaning if combined correctly. The framing setting transforms the scene in a two-dimensional, frontal way: a simple horizon line establishes a boundary between the small earth and the indefiniteness of the sky, the only substantial presence is that of the vertically silhouetted tree: yes he thus creates a network of orthogonal geometrics of Mondrian inspiration, almost an over the top analysis of spatiality. The images of the cypress and the pine become pure icons that produce repetitive motifs like Andy Warhol or linguistic signs that are ambiguously Magritti or objects of the surrealist unconscious. Even in Turlinelli's most recent works this subject loses its initial centrality to settle on the margins of the picture. The temporal factor experiences the same ambiguity: Turlinelli does not want to stop a real instant, but tells about an indefinitely eternal, indefinable time. Cutting the image necessarily excludes shadows, which are no longer necessary. Even color becomes an arbitrary factor, almost superfluous: from an intense, likely colorism, one passes, indifferently and without losing any of the meaning and beauty of the work, to black and white that echoes the engraving techniques. All these semiological elements have such an importance that they prevail over the actual image: in the artist's last works, signs become absolute protagonists. Massimo Turlinelli's work reuses the means of more traditional art, that is 'easel', recovering, however, and rejuvenating an aesthetic sense, now too excluded from the artistic practice of conceptual ideas, not an end in itself, but with a renewed and innovative analytical sense.