Culmi

A self-conscious candor with an ironic smile illuminates the production of these three artists, who are immune to the cynical gaze that is soiling the contemporary world. They forget that they are children of their time, and in this sense in front of their productions, I have the feeling of encountering something sacred, timeless and ancient. Manual dexterity plays a fundamental role in their works, and somewhat as happens in Beato Angelico every gesture seems to become a prayer.

Henry’s ancestral scenes painted as one paints an icon, tell of bodies traversing garments of the most incredible fashions and ritual traditions, grandiose scenes of a buried humanity where the sacred inhabited the everyday. But on closer inspection those grandiose buildings are anthills, and of no man is seen a face. No faces ever appear, no matter how hard one may strive to enter Henry’s detailed universe, as if individuality and ego were expressed through refined and colorful exoskeletons revealing decaying bodies in architectures similar to those of the Zoroastrian Towers of Silence.

Giulia’s gestures, too, take us back in time. The weaves of pine needles on a mosquito net leave one with the same feeling as when returning home after a walk in the green we find embedded in the weave of our socks seeds and pieces of that nature we left outside, beyond the mosquito net. Even the hundreds of drawings made by Giulia to animate a glove (which is nothing more than the dress of a hand) are revealed through the first tool developed to portray light in motion: the projector. A big, noisy, heavy machine to visualize a glove that, empty, flaps in the wind.

Oscar, who tries to superimpose himself on the mountains visible on the horizon of Via XXV Aprile, engages in a gesture that reminds me of the drawings in the caves of Lascaux, where hunter-priests depicted bison and their prey in a magical gesture, to capture their spirit and to trace their forms in order to possess them in reality as well. Carved in wood, a material dear to Oscar, we then have hunting scenes with grotesque and brutal connotations where something disturbing is happening in the ambiguous power play of the three protagonists.

The images evoked by these three artists are poetic, they are domestic, and they are full of commonplaces that in their hands, however, are reconfigured and transformed, magic of an archaic everyday.

Giulia Poppi