Farfalla, 1974
Canvas - colored soil cm 50x70 |
With an unconscious beauty never exhibited before and easy-going, the handiworks of Mr. Ettore Consolazione - with rather a certain serious irreducible depth recalcitrant to any easy labeling - dissolve in a gloomy suspension wrapped in a silent charm of an easy irony. An easiness that captures the skin and the soul of the objects and shapes turning them into a space filled in with a meaningful metaphysical ascendancy skimming over, with indifference, the profound primary problems of life and death.
Il Libro Bianco, il Paradiso, la Crocifissione are a collection this artist’s works published in the Seventies, while the book La Citta’ di Dio dates back to the beginning of the following decade, rather with a consequential line of research when the artist resorts in essence to both fabric and foam rubber in the creation of a theatre of symbolic figures polemic in their own manner in a suspended dimension between a fairy tale and a dream.
These handiworks are a testimony of a cultural phase that on one hand qualifies the West to reason, in the absence of objects, on the basis of a stock of the Oriental thinking and on the other hand emphasizes on the person of the artist as an aesthetic operator versus a spectator and active-recipient.
Ettore Consolazione proceeds, in those years, in a direction that tends to draw near the prospects of the handiwork with the space of behavior not strictly physical or corporeal as much as creative and, thus, assimilable to an aspect of the theatre where the figure from the perspective of the theatre’s symbolic paraphernalia extends its own action to the invisible.
The practice of a tranquilizing action in favor of a synergy among the various displays from the artistic and aesthetic perspective is also traceable to the baroque concept of a set of artistic works that captures the spectator. “On the subject of space-sound-image”, the artist writes “I feel the total integration of the space and architecture where both the sound and the image represent the elements that define the environmental structure to create a pure space conception where the spectator while perceiving the sound as an irradiating energy is engulfed in a new and open activation.
The privileged instrument of the conceptual behaviorism of such a research which manipulates the world in its absence in a virtual and imaginary way is the book: a place of expansion of the poetic and intellective peculiarities on the basis of a platform for aesthetic launch. It is Leibniz, who in his philosophical elaborations on the idea of the “Libro Totale”, a joint dream with Mallarme’ “starts to use the vocabulary ‘read’ as and internal act of the privileged region of the Monade together with the act of God in all the same Monade. (G. Deleuze).
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Libro, 1973
concrete - paper cm 30x20x40 |
The book as an ancient medium to set the timing, represents a true container of material and time that symbolically unites a dialectical idea (variety-unit, inclusion-continuation), relative to the reality as a constant transformation that brings about the interaction of the individual with all relative political and social implications.
Il Libro Bianco, is one of the beautiful handiworks of Ettore Consolazione, an absolutely desirable object: a form of a soft canvas, swollen and disturbing when closed, which draws the attention to a series of mythical associations between fabric and femininity, the belly, the egg, open up to a series of photos shot by the same author. The image according to a procedure that reminds that of the cartoon animation fades away and gradually opens the eyes to regaining an authentic, internal, non fictitious truth through duration of time in which whoever looks into finds himself carried away in a rarefied and incisive style, inviting and impalpable to repose and silence. The attention is absorbed and shifted to the changed state of a dream. While the handiwork of the artist on the dreams is symbolically represented by the book Il Sogno di Constantine published in 1982, never assumes the univocal and schematic explicitness of the images availing, on the contrary, of a moving capacity which liberates it from formal and definitive landing place, oscillating by the dilation as filter and distance through the contact of the paint and the canvas or on the clay combined in an unreal landscape or an experience of a vegetable outgrowth.
The handiworks of Ettore Consolazione assumes a mobility of transformation as well as the peculiarity of the Taoist philosophy of change and a transitional aspect of the existence, supported by a sort of disappointment and irony. Out of his dogmatic and assertive role, as any sacredness and mysticism, he poses himself under a secular religiosity that designs about it the statue of survival as a form of spirituality of the contemporary man which does not exempt him from his obligations to maintain a concrete relation with reality. Its practicability for the artist is not exempt from a sense of perplexity relative to the last awareness of the inscrutability of the enigma of the arts and the secrets of the life.
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