Giovanna Coltelli, Art Historian.

 

To express oneself [...]with the perfect rectitude and insouciance of the movements of animals and the unimpeachable of the sentiment of trees in the woods and grass by the roadside is a statement by Walt Whitman (1) that perfectly cuts out the severity with which Marco Campanella tackles his work.

He struggles with the search for perfection, that which nature pays homage to with a disarming simplicity and which we, on the contrary, have lost. Art is perhaps the only hope we have for a rapprochement, a conjunction between the man-technician employed on himself and the man-human.

With his sculptures Marco offers himself as a bridge builder, architect of a passage from a devastating disharmony to a renewed awareness. For this reason, his works cannot fail to be sincere, on pain of assimilation to the chaos he wants to destroy. The renewal of Campanella comes to terms with this world in which it is the conscious purpose that brought us to the top of the cliff: harmony is only right if functional, nature is useful, the world is our world, and art it is a closed system suitable for the market.

Sculptural art, on the other hand, has this revolutionary nature: it restores its dignity to time, recognizes its time by not reducing it to an intruder between our desires and their fulfillment. Marco shows that it is possible to think differently about one's existence, does not pretend to "change the world", but aspires to remove in each of us those perceptual prejudices that lead us to see things with a single approved look, speaking the universal language of art in which the true integration between consciousness and unconscious is realized.

The awakening of Campanella is therefore not a return, it does not ask us to recover that dimension of the good savage of Rousseaunian memory made of a sort of natural innocence now lost. His is above all a reference to the reasons of the heart, to that sentimental connection that Antonio Gramsci saw between intellectuals and people and that our sculptor sees in all living beings; we are faced with a relational structure capable of hoarding past experiences and learning from one's mistakes.

It is the title itself that reminds us: "Crisis and Rebirth" is precisely the expression of a process that highlights the two extremes of the relationship: between I-and-you there is a world made of mutual interdependence, a world that it is built on a daily basis and interacts with the other worlds. Between Crisis and Rebirth there is the world, this world that we inhabit and devastate in our ordinary indifference. We use the world as if we were not part of it.

If all this is true, the work to be done is particularly complex, the sea Glaucus unrecognizable due to the layered encrustations must shake to the point of risking injury.

It is therefore an invisible demolition that accompanies the works of Campanella, a deconstruction immersed in the silence but no less determined than a chainsaw in the Amazon rainforest.

His sculptures creep into the art system like sand in the gears of a closed and self-celebrating mechanism; grains that irritate because they urge humility.

This is how we should also read Marco Campanella's reference to the Renaissance, a rebirth that is also discovered. Perhaps it would be better to say advance. The poetry of Campanella's works is played here, in the continuous exploration of the human, of his perception, of the sacred that is in each of us, a continuous endless journey, not only as an infinite gaze but understood as devoid of a purpose that does not is the journey itself in company with the whole world.

Marco knows what an Ithaca is worth but his screams would not take root in a world of selfies; then he must sculpt, engrave, carve, he must make his inner cry his own and show it in his metaphorical nakedness.

We have to find (awaken) that pathos from which we have moved away and that we have almost forgotten, to re-emerge that arboreal living life described by D'annunzio, that dance of interacting parts like the wind on the mountains that hits the oaks (2) that characterizes creatures.

This takes time, experience, respect; requires intense care of the relationships that exist between the living, seriousness is needed above all.

"Systems punish any species that is foolish enough not to get along with their ecology" (3). Marco Campanella seems to fully embrace this sentence and his sculptures constantly speak to us precisely of our hybris towards nature. The times are ripe, we must stop: God cannot be mocked (4).

It is undoubtedly an obstacle course that knows no stops or pauses but rather demands dedication, sacrifice and an immense (and enviable) trust in humanity.

However much effort can be made to clarify the various points of our situation, to expose with all the crystalline prose that we are capable of what is happening to us, it is only through art that it is possible to speak directly to consciences, it is only with the his help that we can cross every cultural barrier and enter the unexplored territory of the sacred.

Sacred that has nothing to do with the religious, with his rituals, but as unbearably unattainable despite being there, within our reach. Sacred as perceivable by any of us but increasingly hidden and taboo.

Campanella's attempt is to arouse attention, not to continue not to show itself: it is paradoxical, if we think of how much of humanity puts itself in the showcase, with spotlights and subtitles. But that is not showing up, it is hiding: the artist tries to deactivate the hermit hermitism that segregates each of us in his personal button room through a choral awakening. This exhibition is the attempt to disturb, to break the boxes for those who would never want to uncover them, it is the way to call us to reflection, to the dialectical gaze, to the relationship as a field of possibility.

We must restore dignity to the territory, a meeting place for maps that no longer know how to orient themselves; it is necessary to take care of the pavement that we choose to trace with every step we take, we have the duty to look around us with alert and aware eyes. "Risvegli" is to heal from the torpor of the custom of a thought that denies itself as borrowed and self-perpetrating, I stammered by the disarming accessibility of the majority, who is always right.

The multiple looks that cross the exhibition refer to each other in a continuous mutual reflection to find themselves: an infinite embrace that wants to travel the whole world to return to the starting point and recognize it for the first time.

Not therefore the solution but the opening of a gigantic problem which, through the play of invisible mirrors, transforms everyone's whisper into a single immense cry that penetrates the soul.

Paraphrasing Marco's ancestor, Tommaso Campanella, we could say that the artist holds the sensus additus and the sensus abitus together in a single connective structure that puts all sentient beings on the same level, each with the divine breath that life He donated.

Campanella, that of today, does not yearn for a city of the sun but with the sun; his rebirth is also an awakening.

 

 

 

1 Walt Whitman, Leaves of grass, Preface to the first edition of 1855, Complete edition, Einaudi, 2016, p. 696

2 Sappho, in Greek Lyric, Garzanti, 1989, p. 131

3 Gregory Bateson, Towards an ecology of the mind, Milan, Adelphi, 1976, p. 449

4 The Holy Bible, Galatians 6: 7

 

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