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Nunc videmus per
speculum et in enigmate...,
Saint Paul told us.
We see things as if through
a mirror and as enigmas. The
day will come when we shall see them as splendid as they really
are.
What
are we to do in the meantime? If the visible world is a mirror of the mystery, how can
poetry in words or poetry in images (ut pictura poesis, an
ancient and forever valid equivalence to which the present
catalogue persuasively testifies), how can poetry solve the
enigma? Or, better
yet, how can it best endeavor to approach a solution of the
enigma? Open any history of art manual and you will see the
countless ways attempted by painters to cross through that mirror
of Saint Paul’s; from the Sahara rock graffiti to the Dada
pranks, from Piero della Francesca’s frescoes to Burri’s
famous sack paintings. No
artist under the sun has the ability to solve the enigma, but an
artist who does not even try does not deserve to be called an
artist, as arduous and inconvenient
as the title may be.
Paolo
Gubinelli has consistently tried, with his ascetic patience, and
even with (excusing the oxymoron) a sort of furious determination.
What else are those hermetic
transparent works of his on paper, his cryptic incisions, his
musical and mysterious, yet exact, folds, reminiscent of the marks
incoming waves leave on a sandy seashore?
Are
they “icons of disorder” (Venturoli) or else a buried order
which we shall be allowed to understand one day? Are they cryptograms of an unknown alphabet alluding to the
secrets of the “inductive method of reasoning” (Argan), or are
Gubinelli’s works on paper the signs of “a poet in times of
poverty,” as Carmine Benincasa described them in a particularly
fine image? I
wouldn’t know how to answer that.
But I do know – if it is the privilege and destiny of an artist to
sound out the mystery of the world and to transpose the keys of a
possible interpretation into images – that Paolo Gubinelli is a
true artist.
Antonio
Paolucci
Soprintendente for the
Museum Axis of the City of Florence
SAN SALVATORE ABBEY,
SETTIMO, BOROUGH OF SCANDICCI
BZF – VALLECCHI
VILLA STROZZI WINTER LEMON TREE SHELTER, DISTRICT OF
FLORENCE |
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2000 Giosue' Marongiu . E' vietata la riproduzione anche parziale.
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