Toti Carpentieri

Also "Percorsi paralleli", this exhibition that re / sees Giovanni K (C) orallo, Salvatore Fanciano and Bruno Leo together, stems from the concept of the continuity of time and from a method of investigation that leads us, starting from the present with the gaze turned backwards, to actualize the past, recognizing the right intuitive and anticipatory role to it. Also freeing it from all those superstructures that often overlap each other for personal complacency, for uncontrollable situations and for other insertions, to which only time , in fact, he manages to give the right feedback and the right value, and this taking into account that we have been co-protagonists of these paths for a fascinating even if not very long period, and attentive witnesses for all the remaining time, up to now.
But how can parallel paths be defined that by assumption should never meet and that, instead, intersect each other twice, concretizing the virtuality of the diagonal paths, to then continue in their distinguishable autonomy of navigation and research, and be also ready for further intersections? to tell the truth this is possible, not only for that real and tangible observation that first in the group Prism and then in the Centrogram finds its measure in the sharing of the idea and its concreteness in the work of the three artists, but even more by referring (how many and what the relationships between art and science!) to improper geometric entities and Euclidean geometry, starting from the absurd proof of the parallel lines theorem. And it is projective geometry that validates the paradox, recalling that if it is the improper point (i.e. the point at infinity of a line) that determines the direction of the same line, and therefore of the path, it follows that three parallel lines that have the same direction, precisely because they are parallel, they have in common the same improper point, and therefore they meet indefinitely. Or do they depart from it? Even if then a new question arises.
That is, since everything is relative, how to understand where and what is, in art, the point of infinity. And therefore ask oneself if the same can be replicated over time. This is understandable in set theory, by correlating the concept of infinity with the notion of limit and referring to Georg Cantor's theory of transfinite cardinal numbers and the consequent possibility of distinguishing, over time, different degrees of infinity.
Having said all this, and in the tangible continuity of the relationship between art and science (both in theory and in practice), the veiled oxymoron that emerges from the reading of this exhibition, and from its only apparent contradictions, between parallels and singular convergences, confirms, in the passage from Euclidean to hyperbolic geometry, the actuality of the paradox. And therefore the logical concreteness of the exhibition proposal and its progressive reading, moving through the rooms of the Castle of Charles V.
Therefore, we start from the individual expressive autonomy of the current work of the three artists who, taking note of a new degree of infinity and in the contemporary exhibition of the first room, are keen to reaffirm their diversity and their emancipation, those the same that the three subsequent rooms confirm and reaffirm (passing from the popular mythology of Giovanni Korallo that C became K in the course of time - more and more fascinated, involved and overwhelmed by the technological aspects of Salvatore Fanciano's theological / existential reflection, attracted by the mystery of the representation of the mosaic of Pantaleone in the Cathedral of Otranto, to the tangible acknowledgment of that human duplicity that sees us as the subject and object of every action that turns out to be the dominant theme of Bruno Leo's research), and then denies it or almost in the last room, there where the memory of the Centrogram and the memory of the Prismagroup become the present of the past, updating the convergences.
But it is on the present of the present that we want and must stop, taking into account that "Parallel paths" is first of all a moment of attestation, in which the works confirm the continuity, contiguity and diversity that Giovanni Korallo, Salvatore Fanciano and Bruno Leo bring for ten decades now, in a "fluid" movement that highlights and recognizes differences, but also comparisons and overlaps. And immediately afterwards, opportunities for reflection with its movement from today to yesterday, and therefore to another yesterday, but even more waiting for what may be in the future.
And here we are at the certification.
Linked to the image and its multiple manifestation in figures and object representations, Giovanni Korallo today offers us a sort of sample collection that mixes together its history with our stories, as well as with that of everyone, between clear recognisability at the limit of contemporary myth and a crowd of stylistic elements, symbols, brands that pass from the sacred to the profane, from glamor to playful, making use of in the construction of image of photographic re / production, sometimes even repeated and even iterated in the obvious desire to solicit immediate reflections and false movements, even and only perceptive ones. Sometimes drawing on those object presences of the sixties and beyond, here become painted and sometimes even animated figures who tell more and more often Yankee stories, the same ones perhaps at the origin of the pro-Americanism that cemented the four boys of the Prismagruppo and that remains here in a metabolized, reflective and thoughtful way. As is also evident in the lettering, once again (recalling Gramma's visual poetic context) between the recovery, the didactic and the mnemonic.
There are still images that Salvatore Fanciano proposes to us in the sequence of his long story constructed referring in a very evident way to that theological labyrinth that is the mosaic of the Cathedral of Santa Maria Annunziata in Otranto by the monk Pantaleone. And so, in a chromatic exercise often marked on the border of the monotonous, it happens that the work, or rather its fragment / tile (because this is the state of the single painting), immediately speaks to us of the suggestions from which the painter was shocked, and that easily transmigrate towards the viewer who is surrounded by complex pictorial structures, the same ones that we remember having seen and shared in one of his previous exhibition events and that on this occasion accentuate the complexity of the texture of clear abstract / informal reference, thanks to certain recognizable figural presences (real, fantastic, allusive) that bring us back there, to the place of mystery and faith, among signs, signals, monstrosities, demons, lions, dragons, oil infantrymen, knights, virgins, zoomorphic figures, angels and saints, and meaningful and / or inexpressive words, obvious and mysterious, but completely understandable having the key in your hands.
Like those of Bruno Leo, albeit according to completely different directions and ways, it was only for his conceptually placing himself on this side of the painted / constructed image, as if he were the spectator of a film (or rather of his own frames) becoming a companion to the many silhouettes that populate urban visions of great suggestion and complex structure, including cuts, clippings, repainted paintings and highly rarefied atmospheres, bordering on the surreal, the imaginary and even the real, in which we often identify without no difficulty pieces of memory that belong to us and that still excite us, well beyond their apparent state of hibernation. Like that graffiti in a long shot, the old landeau, the perspective escape of a building that belongs to us, the Good Shepherd of the Pio Christian Museum in Rome, the thonet chairs available to welcome the occasional visitor to an infinite exhibition, the painter who re / look at his works, the still life paginated by contrasts under full-rounded frames that refer us to the baroque, the drawers open only halfway from which (in the end) nothing comes out, making explicit, in this sort of structured path, the ancient and personal harmony with the History of Art.
Moving on to reflection with a backward gaze, as we stated at the beginning of our text, there are two times, that of the Centrogram and that of the Prismagruppo, one from the other far more than a decade, but subsequent and consequent in time. On the origins of the first as we read in "Gramma" published by the Edizioni del gallo I indicate in milenovecentottantatre - we wrote that they "come from afar, and find, or rather find three of the group, both in theory and in its implementation: systematicity , univocity, unity of being as a compendium and together with the forms and rules of a correct expression of language (art understood as language), or rather of a language (art as art, and that's it), or again, unit of measurement from which starting with what must be understood as an instrumental measurement, a sort of apparently impossible device to tie, knead, mix what must be the rules of the art. Never forgetting the individual, and with it his own meanings and that extreme freedom, which in the moment of the idea, overcomes the same group, to the point of overturning its meaning, even if the operation / processing continues to be done by mutual understanding / agreement in a a communion of space and coincidences, of stimuli and, why not, of solutions; even if these then appear unrelated and different, in their most immediate fruition.
Probably, this is gramma; a reality subject to continuous review and reading, by those who make and by those who look at the fact ", understood as a product: social and aesthetic, without one aspect necessarily excluding the other." Here then are the metaphysical dolls of Giovanni Corallo with his writings and his plastic veils, the allusive circularities that start from man and reach the man of Salvatore Fanciano and the open itinerary of Bruno Leo between sounds and enlarged sensitivities made of times and images. Which means, recognizing the Centrogram as an only apparent unity, as well as a sort of associative / communicative / literary structure (the relationship with Florence and with Techne, with visual poetry, with painting / writing and with exo-publishing) which is manifested and actualized in a clear revolutionary dimension, but no longer dangerous. As for the Prismagruppo and his time, we like to recall that these were the years in which the youth of Giovanni Corallo, Salvatore Fanciano and Bruno Leo, as well as the writer (both artist and theorist), pushed to find themselves in the group, in the attempt to be able to give answers to common doubts, and to orient oneself in the search for the coveted and complex expressive clarity. Overcoming that restlessness and that intolerance of preconstructed creative schemes of which we wrote in the catalog / object published for "PG '64" in May nineteen sixty-five, identifying in the retrieval of the object and in its use the existential status of the work itself (in the permanent dimension of the picture), leaving to others the autonomy of judgment on what is proposed, e recognizing the critic / ideologist (still and profoundly artist) a catalysing role, both for his training and for his information, between exhibition moments and testimonies in the field, or between images and words, the one and the other that later became object emergencies . We wrote, in fact, "that the object is insofar as it exists", that "in the pictorial reproduction of itself the object loses its life, it is like a dead person in a photograph", and "that because a painting really exists, it has need for the life of the object ". As is clearly evident in the surreality of the findings and in the irony of the messages of Giovanni Corallo among dismembered dolls, checked tablecloths of metaphysical allusion and food cans with surprising contents; in that balanced alternation of whites and of the background blacks on which Salvatore Fanciano placed photographs, fragments, traces of life that spoke of himself and of others; in the evocative and rigorous narrative construction of Bruno Leo in a curvilinear chase interrupted by broken mirrors, dangerous metal fragments and reassuring cultural references. In addition to the works of the artist / theorist always mobile on the border between art and science, between new and old loves, and the creator of formal suggestions / illusions such as the the embrace of the Max Mara woman objectified by the rosy papier-mâché hands that come out (again) from the painting. All this in that memorable event of twenty-first April one thousand nine hundred and sixty-four, all played in the search for "immediate involvement of the public thanks to a visual communication characterized by hermetic linguistic presences and by the imprint as an intervention" (the mystery of the mystery of a black pointing hand) and therefore from its articulation not only according to a multiple but well-defined choice of themes: love, politics, conjunction between thought and reality, memories, homage, but also, as we wrote for "Group photo", a of the three sections of “Work in progress. Corpo 1 ", the review that kicked off the MUST exhibition adventure," in a sort of embryonic and interdisciplinary happening / environment characterized by the synchronous use of light and sound, between Beethoven, Borodin, Listz, Nono and Schomberg . " In relation to the wait, finally, and keeping in mind that particular scenography of which Roland Barthes writes in his "Fragments of a loving discourse", we cannot but agree with what Cesare Pavese affirmed in "The profession of living" or that “Waiting is still an occupation. It is not expecting anything that is terrible ", convinced as we are - in the words of François de La Rochefoucauld - that" waiting attenuates mediocre passions and increases larger ones ".
And this of the “Parallel Paths”, in the end, is a story of extraordinary passions.