The poetry with which artist Gabriele Giorgi presents us is a far cry from the customary
patterns, which is the very reason why he earned third prize in the 2009 Premio Città
di Castello. Without leaving the artistic sphere – albeit calling on a different Muse – I
might say that this collection of poems has something of the informal score about it,
so much so that one might almost imagine representing it in graphic form as a lyric
line: part of a musical phrase barely hinted at, which is subsequently developed,
varied, dropped then taken up again, reworked and moved into another key. Like
a leitmotiv that recurs, but never completely the same as before… remoulded and
recomposed into variations that sweep the listener off, far away from the starting
point, into an open sea of sounds, but which nevertheless leave the foundation
stone for the entire creation intact: the original idea. Here the words are shadows
that emerge for a moment and then are gone, like ghosts that walk for an instant
suspended in time but soon flee, like ideas, captured in the moving air by casting
a mysterious, ever-new magic spell. They are pinned down on white paper in
sequences of letters destined to give those ideas life and death, both at the same
time. Every definition (whether verbal, geometrical or artistic) is inevitably a limitation,
and hence a sort of physical elimination of the vital principle – in itself and by its very
nature not confinable in any space shut off by any element, but a sort of paradox of
artistic creation that, in giving the idea extrinsic life by expressing it in a concrete form,
thereby runs the risk of robbing it of its amorphous charge of original power. What I
would term the undisputed hero of this journey through thoughts is artistic creation,
that process whose features remain mysterious because its connotations are strongly
subjective, individual. The itinerary starts from a (conscious) will to seek out an idea
– in the air, in matter, in history, in the ego: to grasp it in a moment of suspended time
and in an indeterminate space, and then to highlight the primeval nucleus in that
idea, the primordial energy “that unleashes the moment of the infinite, evanescent
flash.” Thus thought, by a constantly renewed magic spell, is converted from its
stationary, almost imprisoned state into fluid energy that flows and partakes of matter,
turning itself into ever-different concrete forms that have the colors and consistence
of Nature and Art. In a context made up of sounds (metallic, violent, sudden) and
iridescent colors, alternation between light and darkness, black and white, the
reader is caught up in an interplay of epiphanies as sudden as they are ephemeral:
sparks of Idea achieve completion for a brief, intense instant in images that have the
gifts of beauty and, at the same time, of fleetingness. Giorgi’s stylistic choices, too,
tend towards the utmost textual fluidity: the choice of evanescent vocabulary, the
almost entire absence of punctuation, the arrangement of the words in the lines, the
highlighting of a number of syntagmatic nexus indissoluble in the bond uniting their
components; everything combines to create in the reader a sense that this is a text
that cannot be dismembered into its individual lyrics. Indeed, the collection presents
itself as an emotive continuum whose expressive code is reminiscent of stream of
consciousness: a trail made up of flashes of illumination in the dark and sudden
light voids (calling to mind the material solids and voids of the artist’s works). Here
we encounter references, allusions to moments of existence interlinked by analogy,
captured in details apparently lacking significance, but which actually hold the
deepest meanings in store, like snapshots of reality in which we can seize, to borrow
from Montale, on a broken link in the fence and find out what really lies beyond. And
yet there is something that remains immutable in this whole state of flux, this sort
of restless panta rhei, and it is the idea of Art as pure creation, the image of artistic
creation as a sort of viaticum on the road to knowledge of the Absolute, in the same
way as the Symbolists viewed the word and its function of unveiling other meanings.
In other words, we have before us words forged by a latter-day Hephaestus, who
seizes primary Might in creative Fire and attempts to mould it into (never over-)
definite forms: a labor both physical and cerebral creates this metamorphic poetry
of matter that turns from metal into granite, dissolves into Water, evaporates into Air,
then returns to bring fertility to the Earth clothed in a myriad colours, with its rough
and delicate surfaces and concave and convex natural forms. And in this continual
transition from one form to another, from one mode of expression of what exists to
another, we perceive the sacredness of Art, the ancient, magic sense of the Mystery
inherent in artistic creation.
