ITALY - ERCOLE PIGNATELLI
When he was nineteen years old, and Raffaele Carrieri had nicknamed him swallow-boy, he painted large cups, lamps, bucrania, tablecloths inspired by Caravaggio, chairs, thorny thistles, southern sweetsmelling fruits. His masters were Guttuso, Pignon and Fourgeron. Later he recovered the Cubist space construction to create skilfully constructed Still-lifes which he completed by charcoaling and scratching them. In the fifties he began to portray fleshy women with a secret sensuality. The composition becomes plastic and plays by seeking a nearly sculptural three-dimensionality. His works of this period are penetrated by something baroque and mellifluous, by the smell of a land facing the Ionian Sea. Nature is overbearing, and plays a self-evident leading role. The lights, the colours and even the smell of Pignatelli’s paintings tell of the sea, sumptuously laid tables, frivolous loves, starry nights. In the Seventies it was the turn of the nativity landscapes. Apulia breathes in the summer nights after the daily glowing heat. Sometimes his oneiric, fairy- tale constructions somehow remind us of De Chirico, but they keep the rigorous Picassian setting of the beginning. At the end of this exuberant decade some animals appear every now and then, mainly in the Dry lands crossed by snakes, which will remain in the artist’s symbology for ever, both in the paintings and in the rare sculptures. And one of these sculptures has arrived at OPEN 12: a beast which the artist from Lecce manufactures with recyclable materials. An extraordinary presence, which sums up the sense of living on the earth. These wonders of intelligence were born for fun. Pignatelli is always thinking of his work. While he is eating, while he is talking, while he is staring at a landscape, while he is taking photos. When he gets angry, when he answers the phone brusquely, when he impatiently looks for someone by phone. With the energy and the arrogance of a boy. With the amazement and the cowardly freedom of a boy. So, while the gardener was sweeping up dead palm leaves dried by the burning sun in his house at the seaside, he said, “Do not throw them away. They might be useful”. They were used to create this primitive animal poking about at the foot of a column-tree, on top of which a cartoon-like bird of prey has built its nest. The bird is a little confused, because the straw used to build its house is an old hank of wire which forms an incredible wig halfway between engineering and Arte Povera, recalling the period of the Basements- Oases. Pignatelli’s imagination is inexhaustible. To its machine, which contains the writing of the universal genoma, he added dismantled shutters – goodness only knows where he got them from. Included in the rest of the construction, they formed a stiff framework with cracks on the inside. By peeping inside the work you can see that the nest wire has come all the way down. In the bowels of the sculpture there is the entangled future of the earth. Arca.
Text by Anna Caterina Bellati
ITALY - MARGHERITA MICHELAZZO
... 4 arc paradox, joined at the ends and rotating slightly, diverging thought... telescopic rays refracting due to the orbits of the Moons of Jupiter... eccentricity and inclination of the planes... fixed but flexible carrying structure, under strain, moved by the overlapping of arc segments signifying the relativity of sidereal and synodic motions, of universe design and perhaps our perspectives. Chaos or harmony, a response to the changeable moods of the wind... a wait for sounds...a play of light and shadow on outward dimensions. Colour which emerges from the cor-ten like lunar regolith. Libration of the same face between the Earth and the Sun, along the epicycloid which remains faithful to the concavity towards light. 38 discs, the phases of the Moon to be born.
Margherita Michelazzo
The Moon goes forward, laps the myth, overcomes the limits imposed and pursues the infinite of creativity; light, it is charming source that holds the stead reins of human imagination since ever. With no end is the list of the names of people wrapped and enchanted by its light, carried away by a sweet cradle and free to dream. The evocative power of the earth satellite has illuminated the imagination of Margherita Michelazzo who analysing the works and drawings elaborated by Galileo during his studies on the selenography, comes to create the installation: Le lune di Galileo. The Tuscan scientist, who has opened our eyes and minds wide with his discoveries and intuitions, shows us a great abilityas illustrator and painter with his drawings. The work of Margherita Michelazzo finds its roots in the study of the Sidereus Nuncius and in the first realistic representations of the Moon of the History, then it grows becoming an environmental installation composed by four arches of same dimensions (as anamnesis of the four Moons of Jupiter discovered by Galileo) and by thirty-eight discs in cor-ten (found in some industrial waste), hammered and both naturally and artificially oxidised in order to get rugged and uneven surfaces. The moon discs are thirty-eight like the weeks, like the Moons the man must go through before he can deep in life and transform himself in an existential growth. Star of vital rhythms, for its return to the original harmonies, the Moon is symbol of the flying time, like the rust going on, like the movement and the sound, narrated by the metallic tondi. An eternal swing between primordial whiff and perpetual end, that run over the Moon, thanks to its following and regular phases, simultaneously as symbol of the real and of the dream.
Text by Alberto Mattia Martini
ITALY – MARCO CORNINI
A young girl with swollen breasts, her left hand on the stomach, her eyes turned towards tomorrow. Marco Cornini’s monumental sculpture arrives at Lido. It is one of his contemporary feminae, even with mascara on her eyelashes and rouge à lèvres. I challenged him some months ago while looking round his studio cluttered with finished pieces – bronzes, but mainly terracottas, which are by now consigned to history, having been presented at so many exhibitions. To take part in OPEN 12 he needed a large-sized work of art, something which could sum up his poetics concentrated on the eternal feminine. This huge bust of a woman, with perfect proportions and built according to the rules of great classical sculpture, borrows the idea of beauty and the sacred theme of motherhood from the past. The first dea Mater in history dates back to the Neolithic Age, if you consider the many Venuses found all over Europe. During the centuries, with the migrations of people and the development of different cultures, the Mater’s roles miniaturized into various female deities. So Gaia took on distinct personifications, for example, to oversee sensual love (Ishtar-Astarte-Aphrodite Pandemos-Venus), fertility of women (Triple Hecate, like the three stages of life), fertility of the land (Persephone/Proserpine), hunting (Artemis/Diana). But where does this protective figure come from? In the Theogony Hesiod explains how broad-breasted Gaia, the protectress of the gods of Olympus, reigned after Chaos. She brought forth Uranus (the starry sky), Pontus (the fruitless depths of the sea) and the mountains by herself, without sweet union of love. Then she lay with Uranus and bore Oceanus, Coeus, Crius and the Titans. After them Cronus (time), the wiliest and most terrible of her children, was born. He hated his powerful father and overthrew him. But Cronus, who became meanwhile the most powerful god, began to fear he could be overthrown by his own sons and so he devoured them as soon as his wife Rhea bore them. The desperate woman turned to Gaia to try to save her last child, Zeus. With him the first pantheistic religion, organized in a rigorous hierarchy, took shape. Gaia, the Mother of all living beings, would survive only in epic poems and legends, but her almighty secret, the ability to give birth, has come down to us intact. From the Snake Goddess created in Crete at the beginning of the second millennium B.C., to the Sardinian figurines which were found near Cagliari, in Sardinia, and may date back to the recent Neolithic Age; from the clay works of art of ancient Greek, to Byzantine mosaics; from the Venus statues of the classical age, up to the Madonnas of all Christian painting, the Mother Goddess has kept her protective strength which is able to control the excesses of the human race. And Cornini places a contemporary one at Lido, in front of the sea, with those distant eyes which, as stated in the title, can look beyond.
Text by Anna Caterina Bellati
Italy - Girolamo Ciulla
"Whatever is produced in Sicily, from farm produce to the fruits of human creative capacity, is very close to what we could call perfect”. This is what a Roman grammarian of the imperial age wrote, thus confirming the wonder the island aroused in visitors because of the excellent weather, the beauty of the landscape and the grandeur of its monuments. About this land blessed by the Gods, Homer, basing his remarks on the tales told by the first sailors who had ventured west, wrote, "All these things spring for them in plenty, unsown and untilled, wheat, and barley, and vines, which bear great clusters of the juice of the grape, and the rain of Zeus gives them increase”. (Odyssey, book IX, verses 109-111). Girolamo Ciulla, a sculptor, was born in Sicily, and his work deeply echoes his love for the places and his passion for an architecture which sinks its roots in the age of the ancient Greek settlements in Southern Italy. One of the most repeated motives in Ciulla’s works of art is the temple in Agrigento. The colony founded by the inhabitants of Gela approx. in 580 B.C. a few kilometres from the sea was set on two rises which bordered two watercourses, the Akràgas stream, after which the town of Agrigento is named, and the Hypsas. The long walls which surrounded the town began at the hills, one of which was called Atenea rock, and extended down to the valley where the temples stood. The exceptional nature of the complex already amazed the ancients, who invented stories about the town of Agrigento which told of a rare opulence. A wealth which actually came from the olives and wine trade with the town of Carthage. And the nine temples, eight of which were built in few years between 480 and 406 B.C., just tell how prosperous Agrigento was. The temple is one of the most striking ideas of sacred architecture. Starting from its components, the horizontal base, the walls, the columns, the trabeation, the roof and the pediment, this building becomes part of a landscape as if it were a huge sculpture. Unlike other places of worship, here the inner room had a secondary role. In ancient times the temple was a place which was nearly forbidden to common people. Since it was the divinity’s home, the congregation stayed outside and the community gathered for the sacrifice around the altar outside the sacred enclosure. The largest shrines usually rose in an area outside the town. They were often surrounded by forests and, if possible, they were built so as to face the Mediterranean Sea. Using the finest stones, Ciulla reproduces in scale the Tempio della Concordia, one of the most successful examples of the Doric order. The original has six columns on the front side and twelve columns on the long sides, and the revisiting by the Sicilian artist restores the whole sense of magic sacredness. Ciulla respects each element: the architrave laid on the peristyle, the fascia with the friezes, the four steps at the entrance. The result is a miniature temple which preserves its majesty. The monumental work of art Ciulla takes to OPEN 12 consists of a colossal stele which reaches towards the sky. On its square top stands the Temple of Concordia. Placed so high, this miniature place of worship comes to the attention of the audience in a way which is not in the least trite for different reasons. Looking up reveals man’s ancestral theoretic inclination to search for a meaning. In addition, Ciulla’s temple, placed in this way, faces the sea, the same Mediterranean Sea also faced by the original some thousand kilometres to the south. Placed just at the entrance of OPEN 12 the Stele con tempio therefore offers visitors the blessing of the ancient gods.
Text by Anna Caterina Bellati
Italy
Andrea Ciampini
If there is an artist, whose look corresponds to the works produced by his hands, that is Andrea Ciampini. The Tuscan sculptor has the appearance of a thoughtful boy, which will probably stick with him for ever, but in the depth of his eyes he still has a mischievous air. Even though he has been living in Volterra, the homeland of alabaster, for a long time, he carves wood, and more precisely he uses wood to give create timeless fairytale characters. The figure most frequently encountered in his recent production is Pinocchio. In Ciampini’s works of art the world’s most famous toy comes back as a puppet-child struggling with the rules of adults, which he does not understand and does not want to accept. Therefore Pinocchio embodies the freedom of nature against the coercions of the adult world. But we cannot forget that the creature invented by Collodi is double-sided. As in all stories with a moral background, the wooden boy has a positive side, which consists of imagination and good intentions, and a negative side, which consists of arrogance and lying. These are all aspects which Ciampini has analysed and included in a number of works of art, each showing a different side of Pinocchio’s nature, starting from Pinocchio (2005), to Prima bugia (2007), up to Monello (2009). In Coscienza dell'Io, which is exhibited at OPEN 12, the artist investigates a new element: the theme of will, which may turn to stubbornness, within the absolute freedom that childhood thrives on. Struggling with the discovery of the external world, when the Talking Cricket orders Pinocchio to study and take up serious things, he answers, “...It’s much more fun, I think, to chase after butterflies, climb trees, and steal birds’ nests...”. (from: Le avventure di Pinocchio, Collodi, 1881). In the sculpture created for OPEN 12 the puppet has got no legs to climb trees, and his feet still need to be rough-hewn, because his carpenter-father has not yet decided to allow him to move at will. Yet his arms are wide-open in the air to catch everything within reach. This work symbolizes man in his embryonic state, with an intact hope of discovery, waiting motionless until he can begin to walk with his own legs. When this happens, the choice will be immediate and inevitable. A direction must be followed. A decision about what to do with oneself must be taken. And after setting out, it will not be possible to turn back. This huge olive tree, out of which Ciampini has carved this change from chrysalis into insect, which is a metaphor suitable for any living being, was promised him some time ago by a friend who had to fell it. It was left to dry on the edge of the wood where it grew for many months. Then, as in every respectable fairy tale, it came back to life clothed in another story.
Text by Anna Caterina Bellati