Gabriele Giorgi from XII Biennial of sacred art.
Teramo 2006 Text: Giandomenico Semeraro
It is fascinating to see how simple a work is in its construction and how powerful its reach can be. I am not thinking, naturally, of the “primary structures” which characterised Minimalist artists, still less of the suprematist geometries of Malevich, so loaded with feeling and spirituality, which are so compelling, in the friction between lines and depths. No, in reality, confronted with this wisp of white fabric, which moves at the slightest breath of wind, confronted with this Resurrected who is no longer there and yet is here with us, I think of something else: its lightness, above all, which alters and completely negates the physical weight of the sculpture, and the way especially in which it is characterised in time; the jettisoning of weight, the discharge of tensions in virtue of a new consistency of flesh, such as we are offered with concern and confidence by the Resurrection. In short, this weightless scrap clearly conveys the idea of being there and at the same time being already somewhere else (which includes, in its entirety, the sense of being human and man’s ability to think for himself – the trait which measures his affinity for transcendence). It points the way confidently towards an Elsewhere, with the divine as our companion on the path. It calls to mind another artist who valued lightness, a quality of which Italo Calvino showed an understanding in his American Lessons: a “thoughtful lightness” (rather than a thinking superficiality). Arriving by different routes, Gabriele Giorgi meets Ettore Spalletti, his Resurrected meets Spalletti’s Salle des Départs at the Poincaré Hospital at Garches, near Paris. In both works we meet this delicate touch, brim-full of hope, which is expressed in Giorgi, as we have said, by means of the upward rippling of the drapery, while the other artist concentrates on the sound of water flowing as in a stream.
Here, in Giorgi’s work, I sense this powerful lever for the “way of taking away” a metaphysical resistance, and a positive and indeed confident openness, thanks to what the Resurrection of the flesh entails. A sculpture which “moves towards”, which becomes a vehicle, and which opens up for the observer, fully revealing, in transparency, its vocation for the unveiling of mystery. At its base, as structure, stand two fundamental traits of humanity, two geometric figures: the rectangle and the circle, which we find in Leonardo, in Goethe, and in Le Corbusier; and it is precisely over these that we see the movement of free thought, liberated by hope from its chains.