Francesco Gallo Mazzeo
Art critic
Abstraction is what starts from a point, from a horizon, from a quid and no one knows where it comes from, because it is everyone’s city, but it is not perdition, it is not chaos, not a vain illusion, but a point in the universe where everyone will find their heaven and meet their destiny, perhaps with the same Agostino who writes Civitate Dei , while conversing with himself, with the one, with everything. In his body, in his soul, the praises of fantasy are installed, which are arcane signals, reasons for doubt, but desire to do, like a companion for thinking, a hunt for sloth, a trace, footprints, packed baskets, to trips, research, labyrinths and long straightness. Because this is how the imaginary forgets the emptiness and step by step, from word to word, breaks boundaries and does not end going ... Astral geometry that is found in every one of our moments in every one of our fragments, when it deals with putting an accent where here is a tangle, making intrigues of vertical, horizontal, transversal, of thousand and thousand cardi and decumani, where to wait for the forms of fantasy, as a zodiac on which to walk on, as a mirror of that, to film with the pupils of the eyes, so that the top and the bottom can be a great unity, which appears to us as it appears, as it travels and it never stops from the beginning, (that to us seems so) of today that includes I, you, us, you, they, on the echo of others who have said me ... you ... we ... you ... they, and those of the future, in a sound of the arcane that one feels, feels, sees, sees, touches, touches, yet escapes, escapes. Matter of dreams, the one that makes Homer say, “you sleep Atride”, “You sleep Achilles”, “you sleep Penelope”, but the thought does not rest, does not give himself up to victory and is not content with victory, making monologues, or dialogues, singing, singing, crying, making prophecies, implores, imaginary journeys, in disarray of every chronology, freeing loves, overflowing storms, because anyway it is not true, real, but more, surreal. Timeless, past and future, with all the possible rigor and with all the imaginable freedom, because fantasy is not evolution, because art is not progress, but a great recapitulation, to which are added discoveries, inventions, but without being able to say that there is a there, that cannot be here and vice versa, while the appearance plays its cards, putting up for grabs feelings and emotions, like passing and variable winds, while they are the constants of every moment of the large mirror that contains images, poems, songs, architecture, gardens, prayers, fasts and parties, because everything is planned, everything has happened, but is up to us to make it happen again, like falling in love, which is eternal, but is always new, with the complicity of oblivion, which has a desiring effect, projection of the unicum, even where, sky and sea and land, are tantum. Hic et nunc is a fantasy that starts from the insolent confusion of languages, blurring of sunlight, turbulence of the sea, change of flora and fauna in cement, of the nightingale in a siren alarm, to get an idea, project, bringing a light feeling, winged words and magic, against every sad agony. Expanding over there where it narrows, opening where it closes. Thus, finding the commitment that it is not for this or that, but for everyone, transforming biology’s in biographies, starting from the legendary, from once upon a time ..., doing it, composing it as a new Canticle of Creatures, like another Orlando Furioso, a Republic of Plato, a Utopia of Tommaso Moro. It resembles Ulysses who does not allow himself to be enchanted, even though he lives the joys of enchantment, who does not let himself be enchanted, while enjoying all the seductions of it, to continue to search, to search, without stopping because the search is infinite, as the pursuit of perfection, of the truth, living and doing, as if each stroke were the last stretch and each mile, was the last mile, knowing that (in this life) we will never have perfection and truth, but looking for them, chasing them, is a great joy. Because on the way there is, always the “curse” of Prometheus, who is not repaid for having brought light and color, because darkness does not always comprehend who breaks them down in the state of calm and becomes jungle, the realm of shadows, losing every victory, while Fortuna, called Euclid, evokes the geometries that make of every impossible, a new path, of every enigma, a new knowledge. Alchemical contribution that turns the ordinary into the extraordinary, the “poor” land in a precious mixture, giving a weight, a consistency, to the challenge of confrontation with history, with narration, with everything what can create emotion, smile, word, making of the imaginary fruit, a maieutic essence that draws weights and makes them become light and rising after rising, trace the coordinates of the unseen that may be visible, the unknown may be called by name, by doing convivium where there were solitudes, polyphonic joys, where ... sad silences. Nature is a beautiful metaphor, it is a cube, an icosahedron, a tetrahedron, an octahedron, it is polymorphous, for the aedo and the singer, for the soterio pastor and nomad, for the augur that founded cities, but it is an open door to storms, intemperance, to raids and wickedness: we must listen to it, caress it, it is Mother Nature, “adopt” it, make it our daughter, grow together. Culture is awareness, memory, project, love, but also habitus, mechanism, automatism, everything that involves an elaboration, what we have called the city of the world, so much that at its call respond Ur of the Chaldeans and Garden of Cyrus, as a reflection of flight, of art, while a new Noah (or Noah, again) unloads plants, flowers, all living things from the ark. Opera is the sum of small gestures, one after the other, that remove from a ghost and add to a body, removing and placing, so that the light can magnify itself by radiating the invisible, made visible. Space of space, line and color, is that of the shaman of the Ostiaks, who singing, says he rises in the sky, on a rope, avoiding the stars that hinder his passage, while the hero Hudathu Bilik, dreams of going up a staircase ... of fifty steps, on top of which a woman offers him something to drink and thus, reanimated after a long effort, he can reach the sky (Mircea Eliade).