Arte Senza Frontiere: Il linguaggio universale che unisce (Art Without Borders: The Universal Language That Unites), the collective exhibition held at the MUME (museum of memory) in Parghelia (VV), from July 5th to August 5th, has just ended.
Arte Senza Frontiere: Il linguaggio universale che unisce, showed the works of 15 artists from Southern Italy, Northern Italy, France and Austria on display.
The municipal administration of Parghelia issued a press release introducing the art exhibition, in which it explains that it has “welcomed and supported with great pleasure the idea of organizing an exhibition of artists from Italy and abroad.”
Despite possible efforts, it was more welcomed than supported, given that the exhibition was visited less than it deserved.
Probably the initiative was not advertised enough. Nowadays we work on the perpetual media bombardment and, press release aside and some posters, neither flyers nor public references. The website of the municipality of Parghelia does not mention it and the Facebook page Parghelia Eventi is plastered with posts about the Sagra del Pesce Azzurro on August 3. The councilor for culture would have loved to visit the exhibition but was not aware of it.
Even during the event Miss Italia 85th edition, Miss city of Parghelia, last July 25th, it was not mentioned.
Once again food, tits and butts obscure the culture made of art and eternal beauty, that beauty that, fortunately, does not wither and that never dies, despite the tendency to meanness and superficiality.
A part of Southern Italy mourns the differentiated autonomy and we do not realize that in fact this difference continues to be fueled, like the fire of the last few days.
Heat, fire and ash have invaded the city of Parghelia, dampening that last chance for the inhabitants of the city and for tourists to refresh their eyes and hearts.
These are hard times for many places in Southern Italy that are increasingly in difficulty.
A shame, not so much for the artists, some of whom are already internationally recognized, but for the potential visitors who would have enjoyed something truly special.
Whose fault? No one’s fault. The heat’s fault, perhaps, and the confusion.
The fault of the internet that fails more and more often, the fault of this world that runs faster and faster and forgets even sooner!
The poster of Arte Senza Frontiere: Il linguaggio universale che unisce that the municipal administration of Parghelia prepared quotes a phrase by Vincent Van Gogh: “If you love nature you will find beauty everywhere“.
The meaning of this quote is recalled in every single work exhibited, in the photographs, in the paintings, in the installations, as well as in the sculptures made with ferrous or vegetal material.
The exhibition celebrates classical beauty, its death and rebirth through the transformation and reuse of materials to the point of satirizing and paradoxing the contemporaneity made of automation and technology at all costs.
The artists are:
The French Yglix Rigutto, the Austrian Eugenio Azzola, the Friulians Guerrino Zorzit and Paolo Di Marco, the Apulian Galiano Lombardi,
The Calabrians Ljdia Musso, Antonino Denami, Giusy Giannini, Antonio Giannini, Giuseppe Giannini, Carmelo Lebrino, Antonio Palamara, Cosimo Rombola’, Francesco Rombola’, Francesco aka Ciccio Massara.
Paolo Di Marco brought with him the works of some of his colleagues and was delegated by the director of the museum, Mr. Calzona, to set up the entire exhibition.
Crossing the door of Arte Senza Frontiere you enter a former school, now a museum of memory, which presents a collection of photographs of Parghelia as evidence of the destruction by the earthquake of September 8th, 1905, and of the recovery of the city.
The call to memory and the fascination of the fall embrace the works on display. Paolo Di Marco introduces the works. They are all beautiful and interesting. Many are fantastic, others enlightening.
Among all, the pieces by Ciccio Massara stand out, made with iron and recycled old objects. Pearls of memory, work tools that are reborn in art, pieces of iron that rise harmoniously, in space, as in a dance. Shelving materials and old objects in disuse that the artist models and transforms by dressing them in new clothes.
There is a meat grinder that grinds keys and releases chains, – A stroke of genius! – says Paolo Di Marco; there is a scorpion made with the chain of a Fiat 1100 and the chain of an old thresher; there is a cricket made with a wrench and friendly characters made with axes, wrenches, cutlery, and other objects.
The work of Ljdia Musso is interesting, she uses her body in photography in a very communicative way.
Antonio Giannini, from Zambrone, worked as a precision turner mechanic for years. Now that he is retired, he transfers mechanical art to olive wood and creates enchanting works that you can’t take your eyes off. Olive wood is a long-lived wood that preserves a deep memory further evoked by the artist’s artistic transformation.
His son, Giuseppe, also a sculptor, works on harder material but that softens the senses like a sculpture in Lecce stone that represents 2 cute boats.
From Brindisi, Galiano Lombardi expresses his inner world with poetry in color. His paintings are colorful and full of light, just like the land of the heel of Italy, while Antonino Denami, a young academic famous for his alchemies in marble, exhibits metaphysical paintings.
The works of Eugenio Azzola, guitarist and painter, were brought to the exhibition by Di Marco, his great friend, who carefully arranged the paintings/collages in which Azzola uses colored ribbons, metal nets, and other materials that he then covers with a silicone casting.
Very curious is “asshole” a sort of collage/installation made with adhesive tape and a beach umbrella.
Yglix Rigutto is also a der friend of Di Marco who brought some of his works at the exhibit. Yglix Rigutto is 73 years old and sculpts river stones, pieces of granite, fossils, making the most of their essence and trying not to modify them too much, just by making simple but effective and significant cuts or incisions.
He chooses particular stones as his art clearly begins with a careful research.
Feminine stones, male stones, fossils bring us back to the ancestral bond with Mother Earth.
When Paolo Di Marco began his artistic journey, in the eighties, he created photographic works similar to sections of wonderful crystals but which in reality are photographic alchemies that he calls “photo perforations”. They are all made in full light, outside the darkroom, with expired acids and expired photographic paper. Some of them were made with expired rolls and fragments of film stuck on plates. Having realized the polluting component of the alchemical process, since nineteen ninety-six he stopped making this type of processing.
He currently expresses himself through a new artistic genre, the “Smart Art Phone”, which consists of superimposing images created with a smartphone onto women’s faces. The result is an intriguing psychedelic sandwich.
Of the various languages of artistic expression by Di Marco, the most engaging is kinetic art.
They are interactive mechanical works with fantastic and fascinating stories behind them. Flip3000 Cane dello Spazio (Flip3000 space dog) was created with springs and scraps from a car workshop all held together by plastic ties. There are no screws, nails or glue, just plastic ties.
Di Marco tells a story. Flip3000 is an industrial waste animated by a 1950 Black & Deker screwdriver. – The screwdriver is worth more than the entire work – he says.
Flip3000 is a protesting dog that protests peacefully. It has three tails, one of which has a green handkerchief tied around it as a sign of hope against our internal and environmental pollution. This nice space dog wears a mask to defend himself from our stupidity
… And to think that this work was conceived in nineteen eighty-seven.
Flip3000 Cane dello Spazio can be activated by pressing a button that let it move, releasing positive energy to make the good wishes he sends into the cosmos come true.
In recent days, even new works were born at MUME, that’s right, they were conceived and assembled on site, so much so that we can say that art not only has no frontiers but also no limits!
