Painter, sculptor and designer, Vincenzo Sciamè was born in Sambuca di Sicilia, in the Agrigento area, in 1941 and spent his childhood and early youth there, later completing his first art studies in the Sicilian capital. His artistic activity began in the early 1960s and ended only with the artist’s death, who passed away prematurely in 2014.
Sicilian by birth, Veliterno by adoption, Vincenzo Sciamè manages to depict, through his palette, the poetry contained in everyday life, with the help of memories that timidly resurface from his rooms of memory, almost an invitation to save, in the emptiness of the world, the reasons of the heart. His painting is immediately characterized by its cyclical dimension, from which the need to deeply penetrate the individual themes considered is evident, and which was perfectly represented in this retrospective.
The first painting that welcomed the viewer – in the exhibition dedicated to him on the tenth anniversary of his death, which took place in Velletri from 14 to 23 June in the Sala Paolini Angelucci of the Diocesan Museum of the Cathedral Basilica of San Clemente – is part of the cycle Single womenfrom the 70s, in which the protagonist is the female figure portrayed mostly blindfolded, solitary, on a flat background and characterized by neutral colors such as gray and black. These are women who are inspired by the heroines of Greek tragedies but who live the same drama of solitude, alienation and lack of communication as women of every era.
The decline of society is also the protagonist in the second pictorial cycle, Bradyseism, in which corruption is depicted by the muddy waters of the Tiber that submerge the monuments of a Rome destined to sink. An apocalyptic scenario, represented by emerald green, which loads the cycle with a language halfway between meticulous realism and dreamlike atmospheres. With Fictions of red silences – in the mid-eighties – the painter begins to work on the palette that will accompany him until the end of his work, dominated by the color red. Empty and silent spaces that gradually come to life with simple shapes – triangles, spheres, egg shapes, half moons – but full of communicative values. Stages without curtains or wings, which refer to the metaphysical painting of De Chirico, in which the work of art becomes theater and the theater takes on the metaphor of life in which the artist selects elements of reality, invests them with symbolic power and puts them on stage.
The color red thus becomes a sort of artist’s signature, linking the various paintings of the subsequent cycles. It is therefore found again The Hours of Wishesin which the suspended objects almost seem to mark the time between the presence and absence of action – and life – and flows even more into the cycle The rooms of memory. The room is the place where you stop, isolate yourself to rest but it is also the space where dreams and creative ideas come to life. The artist invites us to visit the rooms of his memories, where the sea and the warm Sicilian sunsets burst into the paintings and open the doors to the world of imagination in dialogue with real life.
Staying on the subject of memories, it was impossible not to recognize, within the exhibition, the paintings dedicated to the places of the Leopardwith the intense blue of the sea and the island sky, the red and black of Etna and the flowing lava, palm trees and juccas, which populate the Sicilian gardens and parks.
Emblematic is the presence of one of the last works painted by Sciamè – dated 2013 – which depicts, again on the characteristic red floor overlooked by the blue sky, war objects (two helmets, a spear), symbols of a war that has just ended or is about to begin. short, emblem of a painting-denunciation through which the artist has always shown the deterioration of reality and contemporary society.
Vincenzo Sciamè’s work confirms itself to be – despite the time that has passed since his death – the profile of an artist of our day who, through his dreamlike and at times surreal language, has offered us and continues to offer us the enchantment of passion that stops time to give us the wonder of beauty.
