Vittoria (RG), 13 June personal inauguration of Giovanni Biscari “The torment of an artist” – Il Giornale di Pantelleria

Giovanni Rosario Biscari and his artistic “torment”.

Exhibition of works in Vittoria (Rg)

Thursday 13 June, 6.00 pmat the Hall of Trusses “Gianni Molè” of Vittoria (Rg), the inauguration of the exhibition of Giovanni Rosario Biscari entitled “The torment of an artist”. After the institutional greetings from Francesco Aiello (mayor of Vittoria) and Paolo Monello (councillor for Cultural Heritage and Activities), the report by Salvatore Parlagreco (curator of the exhibition) will follow.

The exhibition will be open to the public until June 30th (Via P.pe Umberto, 91 – Vittoria-Rg) at the following times: 10-12 (weekdays); 10am-12pm and 4pm-7pm (Tuesday and Thursday).

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There are fifty works that tell – through the line, the colors, the subjects – the most intimate part of the controversial personality of an artist such as Giovanni Biscari (1947–2022), from Vittoria. They can be considered as frames or segments that testify to some fundamental stages of his life, in particular the years of existential and creative “torment”. This peculiarity offers results of absolute originality.

“It is an exhibition itinerary with a chronological thread – explains Salvatore Parlagreco (curator of the exhibition) – which refers to the periods and places where the painter studied and lived, between Catania, Rome and Vittoria, the city where he taught and resided till death”. Therefore, an emotional journey that reveals not only the confidence that the artist demonstrates with figurative art, but also the torment that the man has experienced and managed throughout his life.

There are many symbols – of the anguish and evil of living of twentieth-century man – that can be glimpsed in his works, many of which also contain all the suffering of the painter.

A fragile, tormented, sensitive person, capable of painting abstract works, dramatic figures, still lifes imbued with a pale twilight feeling.

In his highly effective artistic epiphany, we find “a language that mixes realism and symbolism, even though the subjects of the works refer to moments, characters and details of everyday life”.

“Two floors of exhibition, which tell the torment of one of the most brilliant and visionary painters I have ever known. The vocabulary of his signs, mysterious and magical at the same time, testifies to his fascination with art since he was a teenager, whose continuous research and desire for experimentation promise to bring new works and new reflections into the contemporary artistic debate”.

Through his works, both graphic and pictorial, Biscari tried to denounce social injustices, political oppression and difficult living conditions, particularly for women.

His works represent an example of how art can be both personal and universal at the same time, capable of touching deep chords and stimulating critical thinking, a journey through memory, identity and the human condition, a journey that continues to evolve and surprise.

“His is a raw look, both on himself and on the figures he portrays and paints. He takes off their clothes, highlights the flesh, the signs of thinness, deforms them, he also portrays sexual taboos such as female homosexuality and autoeroticism”.

His production consists mainly of representations of faces of tormented, deformed, mutilated bodies, often in erotic attitudes. “This expressive unscrupulousness caused him many problems with his painting, to the point that he never wanted to exhibit in his city”.

Another characteristic that can be seen in his portraits is that of presenting pictorial scenes often crowded with different figures. However, “Biscari expresses the essentiality, almost a propensity for clairvoyance, which will lead him throughout his long artistic career to foresee the illness that gripped him. He looks straight at the observer, who finds himself sharing this state of restlessness, with an empathy that however is not forced, where he also wants to make known a different reality, such as that of the disease, in which his vision of man is accentuated modern, a life of alienation and spiritual atrophy”.

“His poetics – notes Salvatore Parlagreco – were both aimed at investigating the human soul and at denouncing the conditions of women in particular. Biscari throughout his life was both and probably more. He did it in a parallel way, alternating now one extreme, now the other, leaping from one perspective of the existential spectrum to another.”

Joseph Native