A reflective art between surrealism and metaphysics, with the divine becoming an anchor of salvation in a lost society, the common thread of “Beyond the image”, a pictorial exhibition by Carmelo Cacciola, a new appointment in the artistic season of the Teatro Vittorio Emanuele, curated by Giuseppe La Motta for the project “L’Opera al Centro”. The inauguration last December 12th in the theater’s Exhibition Space – where the exhibition will be available until December 23rd – in the presence of La Motta and the artist with Anna Maimone, author of the critical text attached to the catalogue.
Made up of past and recent works by Cacciola, originally from Pace del Mela, the exhibition underlines his poetics right from the title, based on the famous essay by Max Ernst “Au dela de la peinture”, with which the artist declares his ancestry with the surrealist painters who, as Maimone recalled, are experiencing a new attention from artists and users, in a complex historical moment where the famous movement offers a new way of approaching reality, providing survival strategies for a society lost. But if the surrealists bring a strong revolutionary charge to their works that becomes political, Cacciola’s works are closer to the first metaphysical painting, slightly anticipating surrealism itself. Works where it is possible to identify a “metaphysical ancestry”, for which the painting represents a happy place in which different things can be recomposed: moments of history, moments of the life of humanity, the concrete and the philosophical, the statue and the object. Statues and objects that are living matter suspended in time: fruits, flowers, leaves, often decontextualized from reality, to demonstrate that the meaning and essence of things escapes us, is unknowable. All elements which, recalling De Chirico’s oscillation between philosophical world and pictorial object, express the artist’s pantheistic vision. The only living and darting element is the little fish, constant in most of the works. An aquatic animal far from its function as an early Christian symbol of the son of God, Savior of Humanity, depicted in Byzantine churches and catacombs, but which can also represent today the God made man, the divine recognizable in every living being and in the human person, who must be “respected”, the only possible form of salvation. “Beyond the image” will be available every day, except Monday, from 10.00 to 12.30 and from 16.00 to 18.40.