The impossible break of shape?

I met Giuseppe Puglisi and Piero Zuccaro when they were teenagers. Since then, our reciprocal respect has grown like the root of a fruit tree planted on fertile soil. It is always harvest time and our friendship binds us with never-ending blossomings.

We wander around grazing, playing, escaping, organising, arranging, eating and trying to get some sleep. These are all snapshots passing by like when you are at the gas station.

 

Giuseppe looks for structures, as he tells. Sometimes he focuses on small flowers that he gently plucks during his appointments with gardens he already knows. Or, while talking about other things, he goes through the space with his eyes and holds it, like those flowers that he put in our hands before we go home. Thankful I go home. He will release the flower of the space he plucked with his eyes using numerous patient movements. I do not know when he will do it, or how much space he will let go.

There is a need for scenery in his landscapes disrupted by coordinates without numbers, only spatial connections. I often think about a ship in front of a cape. Two big presences, sweetly overlapping, that you look from the distance. The sea turns them into two backdrops sliding on two horizons.

I think about the silent life in the towns rekindled, step-by-step, with lights becoming nocturnal that watch over an impossible stillness like terrestrial stars. Stillness without emotions, like real stars, in the folds of the land or of the emptiness. It is possible to hear the breath of the space beyond the horizon, another horizon of the sky in the sky.

All the empty space to cover attracts me with light that fences me, the vanishing point with more focal points on an open stage, thrills me until it embodies me, if I want, with my present point.

 

Piero hunts beauty altered by beauty. He smells it above the noise of our own chatting. He listens to it stretching his eye like an ear to fountains, puddles, sea, rain, wind blows, glasses. Closing a window he peeks the reflection of the outside world.

Through days that are months and seasons and newborn works, the beauty of his material becomes more and more substantial. I saw him building gigantic landscapes of superimposed landscapes from which essential structures emerge in a vibrating interior dialogue, I recognise myself in Piero’s Sospensioni (Suspensions) as in an out of time mirror.

He proceeds, with neat dedication to the material that moves with every touch. And it reappears deeply estranged, a new altered beauty. The uncatchable reflections, tied to the multiform colour, come and go and reveal themselves in Fiori d’acqua, Orme d’acqua and In acqua. Caught in a concrete moment, they undo the path already covered and offer themselves to new dynamics. Maybe water is Piero, his dynamic sense.

I thought I particularly loved the colour of the sky-blue and used to write  “… I will lay down the skin on your artificial sky-blue”. But the lands that resurface now with the brown wrecks are the new rafts to rest on.

 

Dance is my path, painting is their path. We exchange in various ways the richness of those domains.

The transitive layers of the shape resemble to each other.

In their way of painting Giuseppe and Piero are very different. But the motives, which they seem to have in common, are dear to me. Chaos assembled in volumes, transparencies, shifting. What is visible is light/movement, be the rhythm slow or whirling. The two languages take their own path and the materials take shape and go together following the sound of their own harmonious equilibrium. Dynamic spatial layers sometimes reduced to particles in the delicate texture with whom Giuseppe steers the colour as if it were a sail; sometimes hidden in Piero’s close ups that turn into accesses to go through in depth.

In this dynamic no time, a continuous and erratic breath shivers in the shapes. This is a familiar state.

The canvas –like the dance hall for me – takes the hand and swallows it together with the sign, chaining it to its Arianna’s thread. Or, the hand overcomes the sign and enters the canvas through a soft or furious gesture, in any way will it be … In those delayed moments, when the body is suspended towards the unknown surface of the painting, shadows, footprints, stars, colours spread in an impossible break of shape.

Icy amazement and days of refusal bounce when they are close to the material. The first memory becomes plural, it relocates to more memories that become wider and change shape.

The smell of the material hammers the eyes above the nose; stops on the temples and it is necessary to look outside to the beloved sea or mountain landscapes.

Together we stay still and silent while everything moves. Often, we walk within the crowd of the festival, touching the feast and laughing at the variety of our simple feelings.

We go on without saying, with moments similar to dangerous paths, with evident conscious complicity of purity, throwing ourselves into urgency. Joyful stubborn. Our pace becomes irregular, and we keep an eye on each other as long as possible. Talking about this is impossible.

In their path I feel the simple ritual of believing in light but not in their own eyes. They work on the potential of that light whose rays I sometimes imagine as a human voice. I guess the rigorousness of technique in their room. When I arrive they seem to me rooms that swirl, turned by hand. I feel good, I go home.

From them I get a look without a necessary story. Eyes that see me with the same simplicity as the light that hits me. We ourselves impossible break of shape.

 

Donatella Capraro