Of Geneva Amadio.
It is an art of distance and contact Giuseppe Modicaa probe into the interaction between place and soul, analysis of the margins of history that appear as deep wounds, like an unbridgeable furrow between life and its representations. There is no image that does not shake, that does not sting the conscience from the placid space of the canvas where every transparency, every shade turning blue hides a reflection on today, on the Mediterranean as an element of birth and re-generation spoiled by the conflict that history assigns to this space, Our sea torn from its generative value and made a place of death, an open-air cemetery.
The multiple streams into which the Mediterranean is divided, and the equally varied discourses that accompany it, reveal not only the impossibility of identifying a unitary point of view, but also the sedimentation of rites, myths and motifs pertaining to the imaginary as an area with blurred, hazy contours, which maintains an ambiguous relationship with reality, of never univocal coincidence with its representation.
In this perspective, Joseph Modica inscribes a search for form and meaning that draws heavily on the “Sicilianness” which is the stylistic-existential hallmark of his art, innervated by variations of blue capable of restoring an atmosphere, the sense of a contradictory, multifocal history, in which the Mediterranean appearances they materialize as if immersed in an amniotic fluid, in the return to the mother of which the sea is solemn representation, almost as if wanting to be reborn to a new life, to remove the waste of degeneration.
This place that «it is a thousand things at the same time» as Fernand Braudel writes, «not a landscape, but countless landscapes, not a sea, but a succession of seas, not a civilization, but several civilizations piled on top of each other» lives in Modica’s canvases through a diffraction of glances that marks the mobile boundaries, in unstable equilibrium, within which multiplicity and specificity, vestiges of the past and dramas of the present are intertwined.
Warships in transit; numbers engraved on the bricks of a wall; skulls of nameless victims; the sea squeezed between the holes of the buildings; the horizon line moved away several times, in search of something that goes beyond the visible: all the images question our historical, social, existential and political condition. No level is excluded, in a potentially interminable discourse that speaks to the I and the we, through essential elements that project suspended, syncretic realities, suspended on a void that is itself empty.
Obvious, but never taken for granted, is the ability to question the future, in an eternal return – or rather, a circular vision – which is then continuum dialectical between figuration and abstraction, between space and light, capable of finding in the apparent fixity of time an interpretation key in which the classical tradition nourishes silence, effectively representing the voids of this time
The interview
[Ginevra Amadio]: Mediterranean: space of transit and contamination, a place where “everything merges and is recomposed into an original unity”, according to the beautiful image of Fernand Braudel. Once again, this majesty and contradiction is the pivot of his pictorial research.
[Giuseppe Modica]: I was born in Mazara del Vallo, a south-western town in Sicily, the extreme tip of the Sicilian Channel stretching towards Africa. A geographical place well characterized from a historical and anthropological point of view. It is here that I spent my childhood and adolescence, where my first memory and my first autobiographical imagination were structured. Then, over the years, other changes and experiences will follow which will materialize with studies, the acquisition of experience and work in the cities in which I lived and worked: first Florence and then Rome, where I still live and work. I am convinced that the historical sedimentation of the various peoples and various ethnic groups and cultures found in Sicily is an extraordinary richness that opens the mind and leads us to be citizens of the world. I believe that the various ethnic differences that interact are a testimony of civil and cultural growth. Here the Phoenicians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Arabs, the Normans, the Spanish, the French left their mark, creating a fertile interchange… A heterogeneous sedimentation of memories and cultures which is found in the personalities of the people with a contradictory, changeable character, melancholic and speculative. All this seems to also be reflected in nature, the sky and the sea that continuously change color and shape, the salt that oxidizes and corrodes, the blinding light that vibrates, that changes. There is also the suspension of silence and the atmosphere that the tuff dust or sand of the African desert carried by the Sirocco has in the air. All this becomes a reference that characterizes feeling, thinking and imagining.
“Mediterranean routes and circular vision“, the title of his solo show at the Hendrik Andersen House Museum in Rome, condenses aspects of a poetics articulated in rivulets of motifs revolving around light, blue as a color-device of atmosphere, depth and distance. What idea is at the base of all this? What sensations, what glances?
Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco said: “The true subject of your painting is light”. It is true that light, rhythm, the circularity of space and time are a constant adventure of my pictorial research. There is a geometry of the air and the atmosphere which, while remaining invisible, seems to take shape, there is also a perspective of the light which reveals its radiating energy and magnetic tension. Everything moves and articulates in the dialectical relationship, circularity and alternation of surface and depth, interior and exterior, light and darkness, phenomenal, concrete, visible space and the illusory, invisible and elusive space of distance.
His pictorial and at the same time “photographic” and spiritual, sharp and suffused eye tells the story of the Mediterranean as a sediment of stories, of myths, but also as a place of death, damnation, the end of hope for those who lose their lives crossing it. How important is it, today, to talk about its complex and multifaceted nature? And can art, with its other, lateral gaze, focus on what escapes more linear media communication?
This journey of the gaze that intercepts the Mediterranean cannot fail to take into account the disturbing events of our time, those of the shipwrecked, which are unacceptable for societies that want to be emancipated, democratic and civil. But in the end, almost by magic, the utopian projection that pursues rhythm, light, beauty and life wins. Life exists in relation to its opposite, which is death, and in painting, in my real and imaginary journey in the Mediterranean, life wants to be the projection of a shared civil desire and a utopia that exorcises the sad reality of death.
The notion of commitment, embodied by intellectuals dear to you such as Leonardo Sciascia, Ferdinando Scianna, seems to take on more nuanced contours in the present, right now that multiple crises (pandemics, wars, climate change, migrations) undermine international and social balances. What can art do, or rather: what can it offer?
I think that all art, even when it deals with dramatic content or notable civil wounds, is always the testimony of a “visual miracle” of a “beauty” which however has a projection in life (from Shooting the Goya a Guernica by Picasso). Art or beauty, as Dostoevsky’s Prince Myskin hoped for, however, probably cannot save the world, but it can help us, as Sciascia said, to make us live better. Of course art can be a comfort to everyday sadness and push us to look beyond. It can activate a civil conscience, animate an ideal tension that can give confidence and hope for a better future.
His is an atmospheric painting, in which objects, people, spatial references appear reduced to a minimum, almost to mark a theatre of the scene at the same time recognisable and indefinite, a physical and mental space that abrades the time factor. What is all this due to?
In the works of the last 25 years I tend more and more towards simplification and essentiality and to describe as little as possible for the benefit of painting itself. It is an inner need of mine that has consolidated even more during the pandemic period in which there was an abysmal void and a sidereal distance in the city. This essentialization, however, never excludes the dialectical circularity of light-darkness, full-empty, inside-outside. Indeed, I would say that the abolition of more descriptive details makes the alternation of vision and the breath of the composition more compelling. And then I would like to point out that absence is only apparent, precisely because it is so radical, it presupposes its opposite: presence. It also seems to me that, in our current reality, the excess of shattered, superimposed and mixed images, which, with immoderate invasiveness, mixing reality and spectacle, enter our daily life, generate a sort of habituation creating a confusion that dulls our consciences. My search for essentiality in art coincides with the desire to distance myself from chaos, to clarify, to pursue a conceptual simplification with a pause for silence and reflection. It wants to be a rigorous resistance, an antidote to the invasive charlatanism that aims to mix and confuse everything: tragedy and spectacle, life and death, beauty and horror, sound and din.
References and contacts
Giuseppe Modica official website
Featured Image
Giuseppe Modica, Alternanza Luce-Dark, 2024, triptych, oil on canvas, 30×90 cm (detail)
Copyright
All images © Giuseppe Modica
