Exhibition
Alessandro Fogo
Hierophany
Duration_ November 4–December 23, 2023
Opening_ Saturday, November 4, 4–7 PM
Opening_ Saturday, November 4, 4–7 PM
|
Alessandro Fogo: To the elsewhere, and back
by Federico Campagna Wherever you are resting your feet, standing in front of Alessandro Fogo’s paintings, you are not fully there. Partly, you are in Thiene, Fogo's hometown. Immersed in the Venetian countryside, at the green foothills of the Alps, you are in a place where the boundary between modernity and bygone eras is at times indiscernible. As so often in Italy, the past and the present coexist in the same space, often in the same building, certainly in the heart of the people. Industrial zones rise close to red-brick churches, and the latest fashion trends can be spotted among the participants to centuries-old processions. Likewise, in the works of Fogo, what has been and what still is, the symbols of tradition and those of our own present, live together like siblings. His paintings, however, are not a replica of the town of his childhood. His works transport you all over Italy, especially to the South, where the mash of historical eras is even more inextricable. Surrounded by the Madonnas that populate Fogo’s paintings, you find yourself closer to Naples, or to Palermo, than to the industrial poles of the Italian North. Basking under the Mediterranean sun, or shrouded by the mild nights of the coast, you can see forms of popular devotion that defy the years marked on the calendars. Southern Italian streets still resound with cries and prayers that have echoed through the centuries. The images of the Saints, appearing at every street corner as on the holy cards held in people’s wallets, speak of an unbroken continuity with the remote antiquity, when polytheism had not yet given way to the supremacy of the only God. While you are standing in an art gallery, perhaps tens of miles from Italy, you are also among the crowds carrying the Saints on a procession through a Mediterranean town. But you are, in fact, much further away than there. The space of Fogo’s paintings is not one that can be found on the geographical maps. The figures that emerge from his brushstrokes are floating in an alien landscape, made of colours more than of matter. Faint traces of architecture give a hint of their real location, and of the ultimate destination of their viewers’ journey. The place where they have taken you is, to an extent, the one in which also the “metaphysical” cities painted by Giorgio de Chirico arise – whose inhabitants are not humans, but eternal symbols and archetypes. In that region of the imagination, time is at a standstill. Not only the present mixes its flow with that of the past, but also the future loses itself into the boundless expanse of eternity. The distinctions of time, so apparently clear in the busy routine of everyday life, are revealed here as nothing more than societal conventions: “past”, “present” and “future” are like the names of different rivers, imposed over what is, in fact, one undivided body of planetary water. Here is the breeding ground of dreams and visions, on the threshold between the world of rationality and the infinite silence that stretches beyond the limits of human understanding, where “power fail[s] the lofty phantasy.” [2] Mundus Imaginalis, was the name assigned to this liminal space by philosopher Henry Corbin, who saw it as the point where the common imagination touches the regions of blinding light seen only by the mystics. For Alessandro Fogo – whose art comes from this same region as a vocation, rather than as a mere profession – this is the realm of the Sacred. From the borderland of the Sacred, at the outer edge of human understanding, people from every era have drawn the intuition of something being present, beyond the limits of the visible. Like a shore facing an ocean, the Sacred leads the gaze towards the immensity ahead, towards the possibility that there might exist, somewhere beyond the horizon, a land unlike anything we have ever seen. Over the course of the millennia, such reveries on the shoreline have given birth to the symbolic forms through which humans have tried to capture the shape of this unreachable-yet-present “elsewhere”. Primeval idols, ancient gods, daemons, saints and Madonnas, but also anthropomorphic visions of the one God, have all emerged from the same experience of this existential edge, enveloped by the mist of the forever-unknown. Hailing from the same source, these different images have always shared a deep familiarity. The one is the survival of the other through time, or its adaptation to a different cultural context. Thus, the statuettes of the Black Madonnas preserved in the Southern Italian sanctuaries, as in Fogo’s paintings, can be rightfully called “sisters” of the black statues of the ancient Egyptian goddess Isis, or, looking even further in time, of the ancient goddess Inanna, the divine adventurer in the Mesopotamian underworld. Like Inanna, who travelled beyond the world and then returned, you too, following these symbols, might trace your steps back from the realm of the Sacred, to the historical time where the anthropologists study the examples of popular devotion. Back in the tumult of a crowd assembled in a procession, you will now recognise the cries and prayers of the faithful as voices that come from that remote shoreline of the imagination, like impalpable bridges thrown between the realm of eternal silence and the material reality of the present. Looking up, towards the statues that they are carrying on their shoulders, you will see, beyond the reassuring faces of the saints, the demonic grin of gods and goddesses whose name has been lost in time. Until, with another step out of the crowds, the sound of their voices fading in the distance, you will return to the space of the art gallery, under the bleaching gleam of the electric lights. On the surface, nothing will have changed. Fogo’s paintings will still be on the walls, the same visitors will still be walking through the rooms. The same time will be marked on your watch, as if only a minute had passed. Only you, perhaps, might feel somewhat different. And this feeling might accompany you back on the street, after leaving the gallery. Surrounded by your everyday sights, flashes from your journey will resurface from every object. Like a traveller upon returning home, what used to feel familiar will now reveal its weirdness, while a new warmth will come from what once felt far and alien. How to walk again inside a room, without suspecting that at any instant it might fade into a landscape of colours? How to look again at an image, without searching for the invisible strings that connect it to its ancient origins? The lingering feeling that there might be more to what appears. A strange nostalgia for the Sacred, even though you’ve only glimpsed at it for a moment. This is what will remain to testify of your journey. Sparks of emotion, but capable of igniting a lifelong transformation. [2] “A l'alta fantasia qui mancò possa”, from the last stanza of the last canto of Paradiso. Dante Alighieri, La Divina Commedia, Paradiso, Canto XXXIII, 142 – Federico Campagna's translation. |
|