With the cancellations the meaning of the words go away? Perhaps, but the gesture of cancellation is in itself significantly significantly and at the same time related to that original meaning from which we started. So is everything clear? No, because there is always misunderstanding. Spying intelligence, always deliberately unsettling, the new book by Emilio Isgrò «I (not) gate. My misunderstood life “(Solferino Edizioni), written together with the historic and critic of art Chiara Gatti.
Isgrò, Messinese of Barcellona Pozzo di Gotto, born in 1937, tells his artistic life (and not only), based on cancellation, a creativity, now active for sixty years, which seems to destroy and instead creates, which has made it famous in The whole world after years of critical perplexity, mainly due to the impossibility of classifying it and somehow “tame” it to the unwritten laws of the laps they count. And there is always the misunderstanding to be there to create misunderstandings, to be comfortable to the denigrators, perplexed between conceptual and gestural, between painting yes and painting no. Until their surrender, in the face of a series of works, from the cancellation of the Constitution to those of public debt and racial laws and many others, which have consecrated Isgrò in art history. Between provocation, communication and revolution, the boxes in which we attempted to insert it and that he does not refuse, satisfied as is to be Isgò.
They note: «I understood that I wrote by deleting, indeed, that by deleting I was actually writing. Now to erase I write and to write gate ». It may seem like a rhetorical exercise and, reading it, I am reminded of its open but always a little sly smile, just for those who – from an intellectual point of view – came comfortably where the others have to climb. But no, or in any case this is not only this, because it is above all a thought and is born every time from a ritual, as Gatti tells. Number one brush in hand, «Emilio Isgrò spreads the sheet with a palm. Instead of a old egg jar of Lompo that contains, like an elixir, a black and fat ink “. And the creation goes on.
So we get to that signifier for a new meaning (which contains the original one), of which I said at the beginning. As an example, Isgrò explains: “Now highlight two or three words of hell and gate everything else:” In the middle of the walk / it was fear “”. And it clarifies: “The surviving words are like wrecks at sea, to which the viewer or reader can be worsening in search of a sense of things”. It is not desecration, not even remotely, but the proposal of a way to go for what must be the function of art: to postpone to something else. “If art is not able to refer to anything else, beyond ourselves and beyond contingency, then we are passed off”. And it is necessary to add: they are not only words, in the cancellations there is a visual part, made of rhythms and cadences, which cannot be underestimated.
The book, 205 very enjoyable pages, tells all the various parts of the life of the Sicilian artist, from childhood in a poor family, but curious and oriented towards the arts, to youth in a “cultured but sleepy” province, dotted with many meetings vivifying, such as those with the fellow citizens Bartolo Cattafi and Nino Pino Ballotta, and still at the start for Milan immediately after graduation, when his only plan is to be a poet (this purpose has also become reality, and he still claims the cancellations to poetry), up to work as a cultural journalist at the “Gazzettino” of Venice, where he was hired by the director of Messina Giuseppe Longo, and the one as a playwright, who began with Orestea di Gibellina, written in Sicilian in 1982. And again, returning all ‘Art, the idea of the orange seed that becomes sculpture (in Barcelona as in Milan), the shades of bees and the path of ants, the white piano, all ideas that on a figurative background, sometimes classic, continue a path Conceptual that comes to me to be defined as “art of awakening”, precisely because of its ability to always refer to other and almost “forcing” to think. There is also the recent memory of the Honoris cause in Law, conferred on him by the University of Messina.
The whole “story” also winds in a dense roundup of national and international characters who make us live, even in minimal things, a small cultural history of a time that is no longer, with characters such as Lucio Fontana, Nanni Balestrini and many others . Interesting the lines dedicated to Piero Manzoni, an artist other than Isgrò in lifestyle, but certainly very consonant in the conceptual aspects.
Pending the next stage announced, which will be the cancellation of the “Don Quixote” of Cervantes, it is useful and significant to return to the book in the pages in which Isgrò tells the cancellation of the criminal code, “a fascist code that, in a first drafting, restored even the death penalty. My cancellation highlighted the distortions, with sarcasm. “The sentenced to life imprisonment … can also be temporary. Anyone who commits a massacre is punished … with freedom. Who abuses popular credit … has the authorization of the competent authority “». And that word used by Isgrò, sarcasm, with his predominant bitterness, becomes a mirror of the times.