Life and Death of Domitilla, courtesan and mistress of Pompeii, in a Hiroshima than two thousand years ago.
Marco Nocca
do not know why, but the description of the disaster of Pompeii in the Letter of Pliny the Younger to Tacitus me has always been to think of Hiroshima: "Many asked for help from the gods, but most figured that even the gods were gone, and that the universe was plunged into eternal darkness forever." The power of evil, the darkness of human reason, the idea that divinity itself can dissolve in front of the unspeakable horror themes are coming back in this exhibition of the artist Aniello Scotto (Naples, 1959): "Io, Domitilla" is the voice, still talking, a star of the Hiroshima than two thousand years ago.
Condensing the reasons supporting and poetics of his most recent, in a kind of operation to Yourcenar, surgical reconstruction memory through writing, Scotto recalls the protagonist of his inspiration, Domitilla, harlot city Vesuvius, known figure for the first time through the magnificent nineteenth-century casts of the figures imprisoned by the lava at Pompeii. As revealed by the artist, Domitilla is that one day, the mystery, she presented to him from the depths of time, offering the thrill of an encounter with history: a personal history, made by the teller, and received by those who know listen. "The life of women is too limited or too secret" - writes in the notes prepared for Yourcenar Memoirs of Hadrian, "All of us escapes. Everything. Even ourselves. I know my father's life less than that of Hadrian. My own existence, if I tell it in writing, the reconstruction from the outside, with difficulty, like that of another. " An effort to reconnect with the overwhelming truth of his character, breaking down the barriers of secrecy of remembering, climbing over the mountains of time as the Belgian writer in Memoirs of Hadrian entrusted to write this huge task, Aniello Scotto, an artist of fresh maturity, investing the design of this responsibility, makes it an instrument of memory that is not a muse of nostalgia, but a real creative force, constructive, capable of imposing its views and make credible and behold, the beautiful logo of choice for blood shows the image of Domitilla emerge; here, enclosed in oil, slivers of truth in everyday places Pompeii (internal, dinner tables, figures flashing in the light) emerge from the depths of time, in a dimension that Scott deliberately rarefied nell'evanescenza figures - suspended on a threshold that marks appear and vanish, reveal and conceal, take shape and dissolve - to signify the impending tragic fate of destruction and death, coming to sweep all traces of life with the destructive fury of a disaster natural. Classic images of wisdom designed, built during the long study, but original and modern in composition: these appear drawings in red chalk and brown, suggestive of the 'Last Days of Pompeii', almost a pagan myth of damnation. The days before the end of Domitilla are populated by characters that accompany it (the faun, her companions, the young men) veiled by a lyrical dimension of romance, dream no more attainable, the figures here are placed in space with a sign of firm grip: we understand the reason for the esteem and the encouragement expressed by the young Pietro Annigoni Scotto, and turned his talent as a designer. But it is in the recordings (etching and soft ground) that the reconstruction of the artist knows how to move towards consistency in an absolute form, sealing the expressive rigor hellish atmosphere of the event extraordinary: the choice of a single hue (the dominant red), a close correspondence between these forms of hollow casts, left by the decay of organic matter in the bodies of hardened lava, and the figures carved into the grooves of the matrix, making the scenes pregnant with a unanimous drama, which invests the man and nature. The bodies start to become shadows, shadows on fire: and perhaps these are the images that bring back the mind to those 'men (they also only shadows on the wall now) disintegrated by the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
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