Stefano Cumia - Nunzio - Turi Rapisarda
Nyctografie. Scritture tra il visibile e l'invisibile
“Anyone who has tried, as I have often done, the process of getting out of bed at 2 a.m. in a winter night, lighting a candle, and recording some happy thought which would probably be otherwise forgotten, will agree with me it entails much discomfort…”
[Lewis Carroll, from a letter to The Lady magazine, October 1891]
"Nyctografie. Scriptures between the visible and the invisible", a three-voice show that puts together Stefano Cumia, Nunzio and Turi Rapisarda, curated by Helga Marsala.
Stefano Cumia, sicilian artist, born in 1980 and based in Milan, one of the most refined and interesting exponents of the new Italian pictorial abstraction; a master like Nunzio (1954, Cagnano Amiterno, Abruzzo), among the most authoritative Italian voices in the range of sculpture, recognized since the 1980s on an international level; Turi Rapisarda, born in Catania, moved to Turin, talented photography experimenter, with a long career as outsider, among professional goals and spaces of independence. The works of the first two, unpublished, are realized ad hoc for the project; those of Rapisarda belong to a 2011 rarely exposed cycle.
The exhibition, which joins three different languages (painting, sculpture, photography), on the thread of the same umbratile atmosphere and a series of common reflections on the mechanisms of vision, is part of an ongoing curatorial research around the visibility and invisibility in the training process, reading paths, and the conceptual statute of the image.
With the term "nyctography" Lewis Carroll, author of the legendary "Alice in Wonderland" had baptized his invention useful to face that need - so widespread among writers - to take notes in the heart of night, on the line of a sudden inspiration. It is a writing system connected to a "nyctograph", a small grid made of a rectangular wooden truss, whose carvings serve as a guide in the dark: a sort of abstract alphabet made of dots and lines, developed by Carroll about 60 years after the invention of the Braille language. That’s a writing in code, then, pinned with closed eyes and transcribed on the sheet the next day.
From here a series of suggestions for a symbolic and mental journey along that night space that is metaphor of another, unexpected, radical, changing vision: space of signs, shapes, lines, thresholds, holes, veils, blindness and illumination, visual or textual writings.
In the series of Rapisarda’s portraits, entitled Unt Hitler (2011), subjects are immersed in a theatrical darkness, intent on shielding from an intrusive light, which is a denudation, a control system and a spectacular mechanism, for an improper "out of the margin, out of the intimate, out of the authentic, out of the different". A net change from the human figure to the almost monochrome Cumia’s paintings, made of traces, gradients, velvets: the image here imposes on the eye - in the absolute contrast between light and darkness - "the necessary discipline to learn, to see the black in black, white in white, but also in sign and color concealed in the one or the other". Finally, Nunzio's works, imposing abstractions that open spaces of deep blackness and lines of invisibility in the shaping of materials, between the articulation of horizontally deployed forms and the testimony of what the form itself was, by transmitting it: "The plastic object carries with itself the indefinite memory of the materials, the places of origin, of the first glance and the next, of the unfinished and the unresolved".
[Helga Marsala, from text in Catalogue]
200 x 150 cm
200 x 150 cm
134 x 109 cm
220 x 60 x 25 cm
214 x 60 x 25 cm
39 x 89 cm
64 x 53,5 cm
64 x 53,5 cm
