IN/OUT
Curator’s note. By Jaja Indrimi
Galleria Bianca. Cantieri Culturali alla Zisa
This is the first time that Sicily honors with a
one-man show the work of Franco Accursio Gulino, whose name has for
almost thirty years remained the territory of a handful of
international collectors. It is however fair to say that Sicily itself
has until now been the exhibiting space of this problematic
philosopher, and that prior to this time it has been his very point of
observation.
Located on the Northern frontier of the Southern
world, eyes pointed at the Northern hemisphere, Sicily is comparable to
an upside-down telescope that grabs details and fragment of European
events and transforms them into self-standing universes down South.
Such universes are thoroughly known by Franco
Accursio Gulino as it is known to him that to be able to eloquently
formulate their representations he needs to make available a
technically flexible linguistic system and a solid historical
background. With this objective we have seen him explore the dusts of
Paolo Uccello, the layers of the Sistine Chapel, the sheer of Antonello
da Messina, the graffitis of ancient sacred sites, the colorful enamels
of the Sicilian glasses, the ex-voto’s thick and pronounced
paint, the aristocratic ornaments of Palermo’s palaces, the
decorative patterns of Venetian credenzas and corner crystal chests. We
saw him unfold checked plastic table cloths, a tribute to the local Pop
of Sciacca port café; collect wooden and metal relics as from
the shipwreck of Arte Povera; indulge in the Dada pleasure of stacking
bits of clothing and objects onto the painted surface.
These and many other exercises of style appear to
be, at a second look, exercises of the spirit, and they lead us to
think of Gulino not only as a painter and philosopher, but also as a
mystic.
Gulino carries with him a history of silent
research and a production of imposing works. Of his life we can’t
say much. His paintings aspire to that universality that is sanctioned
by the history of art, although they fully belong to this century of
relative and local truth.
In the small city of Sciacca Gulino lives like a
17th century nomad, his allure cast between Caravaggio and Cagliostro.
He continuously changes his studio but always maintains two of them:
the one for painting and the one for thinking; an excavated alcove in
downtown Sciacca, a hermitage on the cliff overlooking the African
seas, a large storage room filled with found objects, or an old and
fainting rural house.
It doesn’t matter if his experience is that
of the Academy or the Craftman's Guild; whether his life is to be
recorded as bohemian or bourgeois; whether or not he observes a
religion; if the complex and wondrous grammar of a troublesome
childhood comes to surface in his visual inventions. Even less it
matters whether he sees himself a man or a woman, if his land is a land
of transit, if his archetypes are spread throughout history, or if his
commentaries are based on stories of every day violence.
In the inaccessible immobility of Sicily, Gulino
lives in a continuous and frantic peregrination, only interrupted by
secret times of meditation during which he distills and lets decant the
materials that his mind and his hand have previously collected. And
when the moment comes to lay brush on canvas, instead of abstracting
from history, Gulino breaks history up in fine details so as to make it
a metonymy destined to be inflated thereafter and generate a metaphor.
It is indeed this man, a mystic and a researcher,
who stands immobile at the foundation of Europe as if it were the place
that in the cabalistic tree is called "Malchut" - the
Realm - where what above is a whole manifest as a fragment and what is
a fragment from above becomes a whole. The work of the artist is in
this place a laborious and progressive process of perspectives and
stages; the passage from an object to its image, from one studio to the
other, from internal to social life, from a thought to a brush, from
law to legend, from ethics to faith, and from Sicily to the larger
world. All this is - for Franco Gulino - a restless voyage of In and
Out.
It is not by chance therefore that the core of
this exhibition consists of seven gigantic doors. As we search the
entry "door" in the dictionary, we find over a thousand
examples, and all of them have a notable common trait. These entryways
are for a great part main doors to which someone holds the key: the
door of the temple, whose key the priest holds; the door of life/woman,
whose key the man holds; the door of the city, whose key the king
holds; the door of time, whose key Janus holds like Ganesh; the African
door of Towara, whose key the wise warrior holds.
But these doors of Gulino are instead all service
doors, and to make more incisive their lack of key, the artist uses a
trick: the doors are laid horizontally. Service doors are doors to
which those called by virtue of their knowledge and their skills
have access; doors entered by those who hold no key and no birthright,
doors whose flow of in and out is essential to the survival and the
maintenance of the building.
And it is exactly here, at the foundation of
Europe, on the crest of Africa, in the full exercise of his expressive
possibilities, immersed in religious rather than historical time (the
time of thinking vs. the time of doing), armed with metonymies and
metaphors (that - as Roman Jacobsen has taught us - are at once
instruments of discourse and forms of aphasia), that Franco Accursio
Gulino allows us, in the short mise en scène of an exhibition,
to participate in his mystic vision.
The seven doors that we are not entitled to open
are the door-visions that Gulino has brought us out of his hermitage,
out of his dreams, out of the spirit, out, to the common world and in
the common age. Philosopher, painter and mystic, he allows us to share
his imagery: the result of the learning and exercise that he the artist
has developed to be granted the faculty to go in and out.
He goes even further as he makes available for us
prodigious legs, trans-vests, dancing bodies. Like the imagery of the
biblical tabernacle he offers the inspiration to explore the world
beyond its basic structures; he suggests the rhetorical figures to
pronounce the sacred formula of the passage.
And here he stops. It is up to us now to become "in
transit"; to turn the vision into knowledge; to make sure that the
powers of the metonymy and metaphor will not make us mute and that we
will not remain still at the doorstep of a vision.
