A Sicilian artist in the heart of literary Lombardy. Emilio Isgrò, the man of erasures, was the protagonist of the last event of the «Lecco city of the Betrothed» festival. In an evening entitled «My encounter with Alessandro Manzoni’s Quarantana», Isgrò (originally from Barcellona Pozzo di Gotto) conducted the evening with his cultured and discursive wit, serene and at the same time unscrupulous, enough to provoke the audience with a courtesy full of ideas and variations. In other words: you can accept classicism even by questioning it. Thus the artist, tracing a path which with different data is similar to his biography, underlined how the noble and conservative Manzoni remained linked to the Enlightenment even after his full adhesion to Catholicism and then, as an observant Catholic, voted in favor of the annexation of Rome to the new Italian State in antithesis to the Pope’s wishes.
In short, the artist’s freedom can never be questioned, not even in places where Manzoni is sacred, even if Isgrò’s deletions involved the lines of “The Betrothed” and the famous portrait that Francesco Hayez made of the Lombard writer. Isgrò’s Bianchetto (one of his most famous works) left its mark on the so-called «Quarantana», the edition personally edited by Manzoni and illustrated by Alessandro Gonin. The work was created for Casa Manzoni in 2016, simultaneously with the great exhibition that Palazzo Reale in Milan dedicated to Isgrò.
In the exchange of opinions with Mauro Rossetto (artistic director of the festival), Giuseppina Di Gangi (manager of the Culture and Tourism Area of the Municipality of Lecco), Marco Bazzini (art historian, professor at the Academy of Urbino) and Giulio Desiderio (exhibition architect), Isgrò underlined both the power of Manzoni’s writing, capable of emerging even from the deleted page, and his ability to establish himself as a forerunner visual director on Gonin’s work, in which the images integrate perfectly with the text. So much so that in the portrait of Hayez, Isgrò left only the eyes (of the director) and hands (of the writer) free.
The Sicilian artist celebrated his 88th birthday in Milan with the presentation of the new book «The adventurous life of Emilio Isgrò» (Interlinea).