Toti Carpentieri

In that sort of entirely personal attention to the confluences and intertwining that identify and differentiate the paths of each of us, it happens to be surprised, and how not to do it, by that double and almost contemporary solicitation to look at the myth of Orpheus, which has come down to us. in recent months by Giovanni Korallo, companion of a long journey linked to the image and its overcoming, and by Fernando Sulpizi author of those "Sonnets to Orfeo", for piccolo, flute and piano, having as poetic reference the homonymous verses by Rainer M. Rilke, giving rise to new reflections on the comparison and relationships between different disciplines and aesthetic codes, and therefore on the concept of total art.
From such an overlap of recent solicitations, the drafting of this text for "Variations on the myth of Orpheus" was born, the exhibition that Giovanni Korallo proposes in the spaces of the Palmieri Foundation in Lecce, according to an emotional path to which the entrance song and the song output of Fernando Sulpizi, confer not only the temporal terms of reading, but also infinite modalities of other itineraries ranging from myth to literature, to visuality, to philosophy, to sonority, to religion, to psychoanalysis, to astronomy, to cinema, science, re-emerging past and recent memories that touch, albeit in different ways and different intensities, Plato and Apollonio Rodio, Virgilio and Ovidio Poliziano, Pavese and Kerouac, Camus and Buzzati, Cocteau and Apollinaire, Monteverdi and Gluck , Offenbach and Listz, as well as Tintoretto and Rubens, Rodin and Luca della Robbia, but also Vinicius de Moraes, Alda Merini and Carmen Consoli. All bewitched by Apollo's favorite.
But who is, then, Orpheus?
What is his charm?
And what is the mystery of him?
In our opinion, the eleven works that Giovanni Korallo developed on the son of Calliope and Eagro (but also of Apollo and Clio?) And on his life full of legends give a particular and suggestive answer, in our opinion. . Or rather, on that part of it that from the fatigue of the Argonauts is mingled with love for the nymph Eurydice, and ends with the descent into the Underworld in a sort of impossible challenge to the gods and the inevitability of fate.
Eleven slides, therefore, or even eleven frames of a sequence that far beyond the physiognomic recognizability of Orpheus and Eurydice, of Aristeo and Charonte, of the Erinyes (Aletto, Tisifone and Meger) and of the gods (Hermes psycopompos to check the regularity of the pact with Hades and Persephone), of Jason and the Argonauts (Castor, Pollux, Heracles and Jason), makes us rediscover those "intimate and personal visions of rarefied poetry and great sensitivity", so dear to Giovanni Korallo, of which we already had written, but also his constant movement between memory and culture, between references and private choices, thanks to a beautiful painting that refers, and could not fail to be so, to a very specific Italian manner dense with zigzagging lozenges, emblematic referential, heraldic architectures symbologies.
And on scenographic installations of great involvement, sometimes bordering on the metaphysical and the surreal (that memory of the rediscovered bathrooms, which we were already talking about on the occasion of "Le Stanze"), to which the design gives new rigor and the color unusual charms figures: the musician Orpheus who sings love with the inseparable lyre and the modest Eurydice, the monster and the snake, the women and the gods, the Lombrosian features of Aristeo, the sirens, the sea, the sky and the vegetation, they move between visual references of a clear Mediterranean matrix, thanks to that persistent know-how "to do painting" that belongs to Korallo since the pop forays of the early sixties, between anthropomorphisms and allegories, pretexts and passions, physicality and inventions.