| GIOVANNI TRUNCELLITO |
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| text by Duccio Trombadori |
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The centre of the composition is always an
eye, avid in its circular motion paying attention to capture all forms of chromatic and
formal importance. And it is the eye, like a tiara, or a fiery sun, or the base of drapery
which has just been moved by a gust of air, which returns to formally observe the works
that Giovanni Truncellito offers us, painted but not composed in a detached vision. These
products of his fantasy appear to be a residue of experience, the description of a
personal journey to hell performed with the pathos of who appears to be still under the
effect of the experience. In fact Truncellito combines his figurative knowledge to create
a theatre which does not present a vaguely allusive and parlour room type mythology. The
intentionally elegant tracts do not interest him as much as the urgency to explain a way
of hearing or of observing. A similar energy motivates vision and pushes the author
towards an existentially shared narration, where the senses are the masters, which are
taken to the limits of imperious questions as radical as they are unanswerable. In these
paintings there is an echo of a decadence revisited in a way respective to who
distinguishes the neo-pagan trick of exhibited and evoked sumptuousness. And if one goes
even further, one obtains a perturbing effect from the image, a long way from simple
hedonistic pleasure. This is how, in a painting of pre-Raphaelite grace, one is able to
encounter passages of direct and strong colour, very distant from the sentimental analysis
and closer to the perturbed fabulism of a Savinio surrealism or to the combination which
normally only a sensitivity educated according to post-modern thoughts is able to narrate.
In this sense, the arabesque of vague backgrounds blinding with cosmic light, where the
sky and earth combine in an inedited celestial pattern, wraps in a most contrasting way
the emerging of the human bodies which are suspended in space but clearly distinctive:
women with a matronly air, Demetre showing the abundance of her breasts and male bodies,
wandering, lost in the mystery of a mortal adventure which illustrates a initiatory cycle.
Truncellito is an artist of romantic temperament. He imposes sentiment on the shapes and
for this reason the rays of his reds, his yellows and his blues are not limited to a
simply decorative image. Certain recurrent waves emerge in the composition, which never
relent the circular motion of the eye and express the fixation of a glance, the enunciated
parable of a body, the mineral force of a human figure freed from a symbol. It is clear
that the art becomes nearly a pretext, or rather, the servant of a reign of mysteries
still to be discovered. The Pompeian tracts of certain figures, so parietal in their
disposition - like Orfeo, or Algida Voce or Idillio takes us to a first in the chromatic
atmosphere which does not admit correspondences or analogies. We are isolated in a mute
scene where life seems to reproduce its drama as in a mirror: the dialect of the sexes and
their metamorphosis are exhibited in the figures of a youth without age, with ultra
mundane landscapes, where Ganimede and Giove in the form of an Eagle repeat in a spiral
motion the circular principle that characterises the formal and expressive positions of
Truncellito. But what produces a particular marvel is the effect of an ambience where all
acoustic sound has suddenly disappeared: the scene is mute, but nevertheless a drama is
taking place, in a cataclysmic atmosphere, in sidereal locations where it is difficult to
distinguish the man of God from the man of the devil. This expressionism of the figuration
which suffocates a scream from the moment it is enunciated is a well defined style which
enhances the homage to "bel canto" translated by Truncellito into a fable of
lines and colours. Art can imitate music only in the total compression of sound. Its
lyricism consists in the creation of a visible place subtracted from exceeding the limits
of expression, where the images reign over all, yielding to the "natural". In
the shapes we can perceive all the required correspondences and languor which play
internally in mental music. The colour red is extremely important to Truncellito: an
imperial colour, extremely difficult to mould, a colour of life which often leads to
excess and takes human beings beyond the point consented by divinity. The red appears as
the embers of a cosmic invasion in an enigmatic form, or vests the shadow of Medea with no
face, in acts of mournful vital torture, and again fills a lavic cypress form spouting
from an incandescent background and from which the capturing God takes flight with cobalt
plumes. Red again are the tiaras, the drapery that accompany the posture of archetypal
figures, of "palace" origin where unexpressed rituals are celebrated, and the
atmosphere of attendance is exalted, the sensation that something is to shortly occur, the
beginning of a drama with no finale. The motif of the sun, of the eye, of the concentric
spiral attracting ones glance all resolve in a triumph of the colour red in the presence
of the "dolce e calmo" painting in which the composed figure of a woman sustains
a metamorphosis of shapes, air, earth and sky all ready to dissolve the figure of a man in
their iridescent elements. It is maybe here that the specific style is better expressed as
it intends to represent the silent drama of life, which words, and therefore sound,
enunciate only partly. The artist Truncellito pays homage clearly in "mito" and
"bel canto" with the added value of an image which does not limit itself to
illustration or allusion, but enters into the centre of its creation taking shape from the
lines and colours. In this sense Truncellito's scenographic repertoire is nearly a
restraint or a limit to the exuberance of his expressive intention. The architectonic
bodies, the human figures, the apocalyptic parables end up measuring their stride with a
visual inspiration which aims to exuberate in the poetic informality, to the limit of
self-destruction, the mystery to which the artist dedicates the votive temple of his
expressivity is maybe contained in that indistinct and chaotic splendour that the destiny
of man cries for when, from the magma, it attempts to emerge in a precarious identity. The
tragedy of Medea, who painfully pays the price of becoming too human; and the tragedy of
love, where men and women pay for the impossibility of an authentic recomposition. Maria
Callas entrusted to the sound of her voice the recalling power of an echo so close to the
secret drama of existence. And Trucellito with his artistic and silent performance has
depicted that ultra mundane singing, attempting to imagine the place that it originated.
This difficult venture attracts above all an artistic temperament, because it is risky
and, in a certain way, tremendous. Just as the poet Rilke desired who defined
"tremendous" the start of what is, or is related to, "beauty". |
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