Island & Journeys by Ciro Palumbo

The color of silence

ISLANDS &JOURNEYS

CIRO PALUMBO

ISLANDS &JOURNEYS The color of silence

CIRO PALUMBO MIND GAMES OR GAMES OF THE MIND? b y

J e n n y

J o h n s o n

â&#x20AC;&#x153;What Shall I Love if not the Enigma?â&#x20AC;? (Et quid amabo nisi quod enigma est) G. De Chirico The art of Ciro Palumbo finds roots within a culture soaked in Greek Mythology and, in the riverbed of philosophy from the masters of the 1900s of whom, Friedrich Nietzche stands out. His is a painting style blazing a Nomadic path of journeys and memories, of those uncertainties amplified by loneliness, in an artistic dictation that sometimes approaches a Wagnerian symphony and at times, is as puzzling as a mysterious ritual. The artist leads the man-genius, the prophet, beyond the good and the bad because he is destined to a proud solitude where he finds liberation from the crowd.

In a complex mental architecture made of ancient fairytales and modern “piazze” it plays like an “adagio.” The painted scenes elude to a life that has crossed all paths and knows the long and endless journeys, even those times when lost on the horizon, leading the spectator’s mindset to his goal, and his horizon. The complex language is simple for Palumbo but in the eyes of the observer, appears as undecipherable if one applies the traditional categories of aesthetics. The author worries about this more than the art schematics have taught us, of the atmosphere that

the single motive generates in the spectator. Certainly the artist seems to have planned his paintings with an alphabet, always resorting to new combinations, even if the images rotate around analogous themes, in a constant effort to exceed a boundary; a contrasting force housed in the soul pushing restlessly in the search for the essence of all things. This research implies that the things represented have their own significance well beyond their simple appearance and that the painting cannot remain on the surface, but flaunts upon the canvas the most buried secret, the internal material of which it is made. A concept of art emerges becoming evident that it does not believe in the value of the perceptive experience to configure itself. It is an intellectual act that does not abate with the imitation of reality, but the re-creation, surpassing the limit that figurative art has always felt unavoidable. In other words, Palumbo’s art is consistency or coherence

between content and form, and between verisimilitude and expressive dictation. If the world of forms and shapes and their joined meanings is not enough, it would be necessary to resort to the meanings, or rather to a communication that goes beyond the “signs,” in the universe of the inter-subjective language. The paintings of Ciro Palumbo emerge from a dreamlike vision, at times ancestral, bringing back to the surface, almost like Pandora’s box, the memories that apparently present themselves without any spatial or temporal order even if, in the same subject, there are elements interpolated belonging to a different and distant reality: the Grecian pines, beaten by a perennial wind, that are defined in a profile of an Italian city or, a Mediterranean sea becoming the color of one of Italy’s large and famous muddy rivers. Bestowing such an aesthetic value to natural elements, otherwise foreign, in their eccentric settings challenges the place in which they reside. The pictorial path of the author is progressively stamped by an art meant to be a representation, to arrive to a meditative reality, ready for the extraordinary feeling. Thus, for the artist “to have original thoughts, extraordinary and perhaps immortal, it is sufficient to remove oneself completely from the world and things for precisce moments so the objects and the most ordinary processes appear absolutely new and unknown, such that their true existence is unlocked.”1 An “extraordinary spirit”2 discovers the immensity behind ordinary things and

1. Schopenhauer in Parega e Paralipomena – Published in Italy 1905 2. Papini in: “The Tragic Routine” - 1906

corresponds to the figure of the “intrepid prospector,” recalled by Nietzche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, where one finds the image of the windjammer, which is the flying boat present in many of Palumbo’s works. Around these subjects lingers the unknown pestering all “embarking for terrible seas with shrewd sails.”3 In the dimension where time is expanding and gathering profound thoughts, when placed next to each other these objects stand out so completely different from one another and indifferent to each other in context to the place, foreign in the epistle of time and space. The immediate sense of these objects is destined to escape us. Bits and pieces surface from ones memory, signs of a history that one can sense but in a very incomplete way, never really understanding the outcome and the complexity. The painting generates tension forcing us to wait for a revelation in the silence and paralysis, in that mental disposition that knows how to grab the extraordinary in the ordinary; in the disorientation of the images where finally old and modern meet and exchange the sense that is attributed to the passing of time. Speaking of this, one can analyze one of the icons from the repertoire of Palumbo. The Greek statue, as if a Hermes, or whole block of sculpture, as used in antiquity, is the archaeological reference and emblematic likeness to a reality that does not belong to our existence, but assumes a psychological value of melancholy and abandon. The structure of the painting is determined by the presence of the classical divinity inserted

3. F. Nietsche: Thus Spoke Zarathustra - 1883

inside, in a context devoid of relations with those objects, becoming illusory; islands, wandering boats suspended in the air, and solid geometric forms where the intention is to establish the validity of disorientation, in a style of painting where the questions about the narrative plot fall into empty space. What Palumbo wants to show is not an action, but a condition of the soul. Nostalgia and loneliness come to mind through the symbols of travel: the wooden boat and soaring island, corresponding to the unavoidable itinerary leading to transformation and revelation of the world. The statues in the center of the scenes, in full light, seem to meditate as the artist-poet remains disguised behind. The figures preserve, although in a colored universe, their sharpness through the pure white marble surface, testimony of ancient glories, of an archaeology as silent as the sphinx, witness to the unstoppable and distant yet so close, sunset of time. The artist is testimony of an imaginary land rich in history whose destruction brings forth a new existence, profoundly renewed from time to time and stated in excerpts of an art that needs to be above and beyond nature and history, capable of evoking a utopian dream of rebirth. The arcane truth, to which the images allude, is dressed in an obscure language, almost a fragment of an ancient text. These idol figures have blindfolded eyes, bodies struggling, the chest reclined backwards and, behind their shoulders, a scene of life seemingly suspended and inert. The knowledge of an impossible existence is projected in this refined space, at times a metaphor and at times irony,

of a lingering mystery. In the final analysis lies the impossibility or inability of the art to legitimize itself. It is as if a system inside history, trying to find the key each time for understanding the mechanisms of contemporary society, which for this reason, remains in a condition of unfamiliarity with respect to the individual. Hence, the work of art is configured as an open equation, declaring explicitly the absence of that very equation. In those objects, which take on a new and different face from what they always manifested in reality, is a feeling of an overturned and upside-down world. The knowledge of the inescapable, the awareness of decay and of extinction preludes the vision of the beyond, which gives back to us the sense of the unknown and of infinite distances. The actors of these works know how to wait for destiny and know what is needed to live to the end, thereby defeating time and oblivion. The artist gives life to an aesthetic space where objects are suspended in wait yet at the same time waiting for that particular movement, creating this unusual condition for those who gaze upon the works, with their legacy of memories, culture and sentiments and emotions. It is the spectator who ultimately gives sense to the works, born from reflecting lenses of the author, even in the various malformations of reality. The works are an enigma because they are independent from the objects represented and from the technique used to represent them, reducing the art to a completely interior

and cerebral state of being. Apollinaire once said that one does not have to search for the idyll, not even in a romance as used by Bocklin. Even his condition was to reproduce interior images, painted dreams, legitimized by the freedom of a modern poetrylike idea leading one to the spirit of things. The word metaphysical, which is so often used in reference to the works of Palumbo, becomes the paradigm for existence. The knowledge of what always escapes, gives us the possibility to grasp the profound significance of what we call reality, the true existence lying beyond the receptive experience. With art there are no answers just mysteries, which are given back with an atmosphere generating in the spectator a sense of anticipation and hope. The coup de tĂŠatre is the paradox, witty syllogism moving forward by narrative force reminding one of a certain modern theatre trying to evoke in the spectator a sort of apprehension, a sort of waiting and narrative suspension. Just as in the theatre, it is necessary for a mechanism, or contraption to set things in motion, unfolding in a fixed time frame. So it is with a work of art, the sense of an approaching event or of a prophecy catalyzes the spectator putting us in a condition to read the causality of the events through citations and clues the artist displays on the canvas. The accidentalness of the objects and their inanity, created from a discarded scrap or from a minimum variation of motion, are like the relentless hands of an imaginary clock suggesting that the hour has already passed. It is exactly in this dimension of time, that the theme is

realized. The eternal return and the absolute cyclic nature, infinitely repetitive, as the nature of all things, proposing again those same motives although stated through different themes, translates into images the moment where change is joined to the eternal search for logic and sense; a meaning that can only remain obscure in the total victory of the irrational or senseless. Palumbo sees in this unknown, the endless possibility of newer and higher semblances aroused by art. The radical madness of existence incites and pushes one to the continual creation of different and significant destinations. It is exactly through art where space is found, the hypothesis of unconditional happiness, a sort of ecstasy where that “terrible vacuum,” “that lack of sense in the universe, in the words of De Chirico, where all is revealed through a playful discovery.” In other words, the ecstatic discovery of the inanity or foolishness of the world yet also the force animating it, in which the artist participates, implicates cheerfulness and even more, a sensation of power. The images are pliant with color and change depending on the light, extremely sensitive to the behavior yet never deprived of strong decorative accents. The continual harmony between light and color create a musicality, an auditory score substituting as word. The paintings of the piazze, of open places, of illusory architecture, arches, arcades and the solid yet colorful geometric shapes, become reference points to the grand masters of modern art as well as, to the Italian Renaissance painting that forms, in

certain areas, a game, the subtle self-irony of an artist aware that art indicates unusual points of view to the observer, new suggestions, trying to verify sensations born from a force within making the layers dazzling. The settings are valid and true acts of placement on a stage, architectural spaces in these paintings amount to settings although devoid of the human figure, where the backdrops become real and true protagonists, absolute places. It is the intensity of the vacuum, of the unsaid, that assumes fullness and is determined paradoxically by the concentration of the objects in a precise position, changeable islands of ones memory. If some figure could have inhabited these spaces in times gone by, now what is left is only a semblance of figures without apparent life, monuments, citations from other works, from other dreams. It is the background that is full; the space is so thick that not even the light seems real. The perspectives of the constructions upset our points of view so that the architectures offer the eye unusual spaces and secret corners. The works of art do not circumscribe to the narrative space, but it is the presence of that cosmic drama enveloping man forcing him into the spiral of a past and future that blur together while the puzzling questions about our existence find, in art, the sanctification redressing that tranquil appearance and comforting genial construction. Thus with every gesture and word one loses the sense and sound and everything magically becomes silent.

Mondi lontanissimi 2013, oil on canvas, 100x100 cm (39,4x39,4 inch)

Porto con me i sogni 2013, oil on canvas, 119,5x100 cm (47,1x39,4 inch)

Un poetico viaggio 2013, oil on canvas, 80x80 cm (31,5x31,5 inch)

Viaggi nellâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;infinito 2013, oil on canvas, 94x131 cm (37,4x51,6 inch)

Isola inconscia 2012, oil on canvas, 90x90 cm (35,5x35,5 inch)

In volo la sorgente 2012, oil on canvas, 60x60 cm (23,6x23,6 inch)

Un pensiero nascosto 2012, oil on canvas, 90x90 cm (35,5x35,5 inch)

Gli Argonauti 2013, oil on canvas, 80x80 cm (31,5x31,5 inch)

Attese 2013, oil on canvas, 60x70 cm (23,6x27,6 inch)

Vedette 2012, oil on canvas, 50x60 cm (19,7x23,6 inch)

Una Visione 2013, oil on canvas, 80x80 cm (31,5x31,5 inch)

Lassù l’oracolo 2013, oil on canvas, 60x70 cm (23,6x27,6 inch)

Sospensione 2013, oil on canvas, 60x70 cm (23,6x27,6 inch)

La notte sarĂ propizia 2013, oil on canvas, 80x60 cm (31,5x23,6 inch)

Dove appaiono i sogni 2013, oil on canvas, 70x60 cm (27,6x23,6 inch)

Mi Ă¨ apparso un sogno 2013, oil on canvas, 45x40 cm (17,7x15,8 inch)

La Bellezza Ă¨ oltre 2013, oil on canvas, 110x130 cm (43,3x51,2 inch)

Panorama 2013, oil on canvas, 50x60 cm (19,7x23,6 inch)

Poesia nellâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;aria 2013, oil on canvas, 70x60 cm (27,6x23,6 inch)

Magico interno 2013, oil on canvas, 100x80 cm (39,4x31,5 inch)

Pensieri in volo 2012, oil on canvas, 60x50 cm (23,6x19,7 inch)

Magiche stanze 2013, oil on canvas, 100x80 cm (39,4x31,5 inch)

Interno degli enigmi 2013, oil on canvas, 60x70 cm (23,6x27,6 inch)

Magico interno 2012, oil on canvas, 50x40 cm (19,7x15,8 inch)

Interno metafisico 2013, oil on canvas, 40x50 cm (15,8x19,7 inch)

Interno giocoso 2012, oil on canvas, 50x60 cm (19,7x23,6 inch)

Ciro Palumbo was born in Zurich in 1965. His artistic path is a rich and a polyhedric one. His poetic starts with Giorgio de Chirico’ metaphysical poetry and Alberto Savinio, to reinvent the bases into a personal and original interpretation. His works

seem stages on which the objects are bearer of dreamlike symbolism. The artist begins his exhibitive activity in 1994, and he has under his belt one hundred of solo art exhibitions all over Italy. His latest important rewards is the exhibit of his work in the “Fondazione Credito Bergamasco” collection and by “Civica Galleria d’Arte Moderna G.. Sciortino” in Monreale (Pa). In 2011 Palumbo took part to 54th Biennale di Venezia, Piemonte stand. Alberto d’Atanasio, Paolo Levi, Vittorio Sgarbi, Angelo Mistrangelo, Francesca Bogliolo, Stefania Bison wrote about his artistic production. He lives and works in Turin in his atelier.

RASSEGNA D’ARTE CONTEMPORANEA (organized by Associazione Culturale Ischia Prospettiva Arte) Villa La Colombaia - Ischia (Na) - Italy - 2004 e 2005 OMAGGIO A LUCHINO VISCONTI (organized by Galleria del Palazzo Coveri, Associazione Culturale Ischia Prospettiva Arte) Palazzo di Parte Guelfa e Galleria del Palazzo Coveri - Firenze - Italy - 2006 LA METAFISICA DEI COLORI - personal show La Galleria del Palazzo Coveri - Firenze - Italy - 2007 LA NAVE DEI FOLLI - collective show curated by Domenico Montaldo Museo della Basilica di Clusone - Clusone (Bg) - Italy - 2007 BELLISSIMA - MOSTRA IN OMAGGIO A LUCHINO VISCONTI curated by Ciro Prota (Presidente Associazione Ischia Prospettiva Arte) Maschio Angioino - Napoli - 2008

LAST WORK - personal show curated by Chiara Giustini - (organized by Galleria del Palazzo Coveri) Hotel Bernini Palace - Firenze - Italy - 2008 MARE DI PAROLE - personal show San Gregorio Art Gallery - Venezia - Italy - 2009 MAGICHE SOSPENSIONI - personal show curated by Francesca Bogliolo Palazzo Oddo - Albenga (Sv) - Italy - 2009 ART BASEL MIAMI participation with Art Events - Miami, Florida, Usa - 2010 IL VIAGGIO DEL GIOVANE VECCHIO - personal show ALL’INTERNO DEL FESTIVAL DEI 2 MONDI curated by Alberto D’Atanasio - Spoleto (Pg) - Italy - 2010 IL VIAGGIO DEL GIOVANE VECCHIO - personal show curated by Alberto D’Atanasio - Magazzini del sale, Bucintoro - Venezia - Italy - 2011 IL CERCHIO E IL CIRCO curated by Alberto D’Atanasio Chiostro di S.Caterina - Finalborgo, Finale Ligure (Sv) - Italy - 2011 BIENNALE DI VENEZIA - 54th International Art Exhibition - Padiglione Italia curated by Vittorio Sgarbi - Museo Regionale di Scienze Naturali - Torino - Italy - 2011 AL DI LÀ DELLA REALTÀ DEL NOSTRO TEMPO - personal show Centrum Sete Sóis Sete Luas - Ponte de Sor, Portogallo - 2011

BIENNALE DI VENEZIA - 54th International Art Exhibition - Padiglione Italia curated by Vittorio Sgarbi Palazzo delle esposizioni - Sala Nervi - Torino - Italy - 2011 CHIARO SILENTE DI LUNA - personal show curated by Paolo Levi - Palazzo Marenco - Torino - Italy - 2012 IL MISTERO DELL’ISOLA - personal show (organized by Associazione Culturale Ischia Prospettiva Arte) curated by Alberto D’Atanasio, Ugo Vuoso Complesso museale di Villa Arbusto - Ischia (Na) - Italy - 2012 DI ARIA DI ACQUA DI TERRA DI FUOCO, SONO LE SOSTANZE DEI SOGNI - personal show curated by Stefania Bison Civica Galleria d’Arte moderna “Giuseppe Sciortino” - Moneale (Pa) - Italy - 2012 PAESTUM ARTE 2012 - personal show Paestum (Sa) - Italy - 2012 IL MISTERO DELL’ISOLA - personal show curated by Alberto D’Atanasio CERP/Centro Espositivo Rocca Paolina - Perugia - Italy - 2012 LA CITTÀ DELL’ANIMA - IL DISEBOCCHIO curated by Alberto D’Atanasio e Arturo Bettoni Museo di Santa Giulia - Brescia - Italy - 2012 AL DI LÀ DELLA REALTÀ DEL NOSTRO TEMPO - personal show Centrum Sete Sóis Sete Luas - Frontignan - France - 2013 LA CITTÀ DELL’ANIMA - IL DISEBOCCHIO curated by Alberto D’Atanasio Locali espositivi Ex Monte di Pietà - Spoleto (Pg) - Italy - 2013 NUOVE TERRE E NUOVI MARI - personal show curated by Alberto D’Atanasio - Galleria Wikiarte - Bologna - Italy - 2013 VIAGGI, TEMPESTE, NAUFRAGI E NUOVE ROTTE - personal show curated by Alberto D’Atanasio - Galleria Arte Barbato - Scafati (Sa) - Italy - 2013 I VIAGGIATORI DEL TEMPO Chiesa di San Martino - Chioggia (Ve) - Italy - 2013 JOURNEYS AND ISLANDS - THE SILENCE OF COLORS - personal show Just Art - Contemporary Art Gallery - Providence - Rhode Island - USA - 2013 MESSAGGI DALL’ANTICHITÀ - NELLA PITTURA DI CIRO PALUMBO - personal show curated by Stefania Bison Museo Archeologico - Paestum (Sa) - Italy - 2013