From Massimo Turlinelli perspective, painting is not just a simple creative activity, but rather a cognitive process, something with which he tries to penetrate the dimension of the unfathomable and the inexpressible. Through his works it seems that he wants to be careful on and to reflect about the events that accompany everyone's existence, the same events that they are common to the artist himself. The main characteristic of his pictorial grammar is the use of polychrome pencil: the artist conceived his sign and material apparatus as the result of a process of minimal syntax in which the chromatic texture becomes significant. In Turlinelli's work we can find an expressive evolution tending towards progressive abstraction. After a descriptive period in which the author focuses on views of the Marche and Tuscan countryside, a phase comes in which nature takes on symbolic connotations, alluding to deeper contents. Subsequently, the descriptive part is reduced in favor of a more decisive essentiality and the exploration of the world of monochrome, through works with a strong visual impact. There is a step between the dimension of reality, from which it starts, and the internal and mental dimension and this step is short. Color is always the protagonist until it becomes an absolute condition. Just as the pencil is the only expressive tool, according to which he has developed an operational procedure that has always characterized his production. In the absoluteness of an all-encompassing colour, the artist articulates an impalpable dimension, with labile yet decisive contours. Turlinelli performs an operation similar to ''Metanaturalism'' by Paolo Pasotto: an attitude of evocation of matter through the creation of images suspended between figuration and abstraction. The desire is to evoke carnal identification between the forms in a pre-logical vision. In a similar way, Turlinelli progressively concentrates his attention on a detail of that landscape, which is his primary reference, circumscribes it and enlarges it, to the point of hiding the context, preventing contextualization. Without reference elements, the subject becomes pure abstraction, a pattern of lights and shadows and color. Enlarging the detail until you lose the overall vision allows you to have a new perspective, which amplifies the image beyond its physical boundaries. The pictorial texture sometimes becomes so dense that it captures the observer, suggesting a lyrical tension towards the infinite and the unknown. In the most recent monochrome works, color takes on fundamental importance, acquiring its own materiality, while light becomes substance, which gives shape to the world. The works, as an epiphany of what is not manifest to the naked eye, acquire an existential meaning and establish an internal fact. Pure color manages to allude to the ineffable dimension that painting is responsible for exploring, visually translating the concept, respectively, of energy, universal human experience, latency of possibility.