Exhibitions, Italy, Napoli, 18 May 2013
A deep cut severed the last fiber connecting us to the Hellenic pattern based on knowledge
of humanity in its mysterious, secret and indescribable form, and on knowledge of how to impregnate every action with cognition. Such a tendency existed in the Myth, too; it was absorbed and became tangible in its manifold variations or pre-Hellenic and Indo-European origins, although with a tangled and conflicting texture.
In Mrs Adelaide Di Nunzio’s project there is the need to explore the ancient tear that wounded our “mare nostrum”, our sea, turning it from a place where ideas and commerce transited, into a silent, often deathly sea. A grand mother threatens solemnly onto these works and becomes their endless re-interpretation key; a mother who will always play a primary role in sketching our cultural identity: the Greek nature.
The tearing becomes more aching; when overimposing simultaneously the traditions of the deities one upon the other, the artist’s skillful performance of aesthetic and arrangement procedures becomes tangible in a lucid feeling of absence, in a vacuum that becomes frenzy to repossess, in a new hierarchy of the Myth.
Mrs Di Nunzio proved able to add an enriching new meaning to the implicit secondary details in the history of divinities, such as had never surfaced beforehand. Her interpretations of gods and goddesses are additions in feeling.
An example of her ability to grasp the unexpressed potential in the Greek, Roman or Etruscan mythologies is represented by the work featuring goddess Strenia, symbolising the new Year together with prosperity and good luck. In a game of cross-references that is charming “per se” because of the resulting changes in meaning, Strenia replaces Janara, now obliged to count the salt grains that, in the artist’s view, stand out like cocaine strips suggesting decay and disorientation. So much so that Zeus, caught in a Visconti-styled atmosphere, looks subdued, no longer able to exert power, a fully Italian-styled, de-legitimated and tired god.
The whole project of Mrs Adelaide Di Nunzio is interwoven with this bearing symbolic structure that acquires additional layers while passing through the centuries and finally reaches us with that decaying implication and with renewed strength, almost as if all those gods and goddesses were ready for a revolt, to take back that secret and become incomparable again.
Before our eyes the stillness of the Olympus shows up at the moment of the break between Apollo's and Dyonisus’ spirits; an Adam and a Saint (the Madonna) are placed as wardens of this split and of the monotheism that does not stop exerting its pressure seconding the apparent and functional irreconcilability between the rational and the metaphysic worlds.
Mrs. Di Nunzio scans the feminine archetypes and the bi-sexed nature of the divine. The tip of Apollo’s arrow with its hyacinth-red (a heart perhaps) aims at the spectator, as a promising love threat in the memory of that yearning love that made the Arts’ god eager for the young Hyacinth, and whom he unwillingly wounded to death during a contest of discus throwing. Charon shows his feminine nature, soaked in a naivety opposite to how tradition depicts him, i.e. glum and full of enlightened ferociousness (nomen omen). The artist covers the Sybil with grapes; she requested immortality to Apollo but she forgot to also demand the eternal youth; therefore, this is an attempt to hide her will-be oldness and compensate her feminine instinctive naivety. Dyonisus, the offspring of Demeter and Zeus’ incest, becomes three in an orgy of glares and frenzy, revealing that he declined from his nature of firstborn in the Universe, a threefold of Bacchus who lost their purpose.
Lacan claims that “the symbol is a hole”, a gap, a sense of absence; Mrs. Adelaide Di Nunzio’s works have the merit to remind us about that absence with great expertise.
(by Antonio Maiorino Marrazzo)
of humanity in its mysterious, secret and indescribable form, and on knowledge of how to impregnate every action with cognition. Such a tendency existed in the Myth, too; it was absorbed and became tangible in its manifold variations or pre-Hellenic and Indo-European origins, although with a tangled and conflicting texture.
In Mrs Adelaide Di Nunzio’s project there is the need to explore the ancient tear that wounded our “mare nostrum”, our sea, turning it from a place where ideas and commerce transited, into a silent, often deathly sea. A grand mother threatens solemnly onto these works and becomes their endless re-interpretation key; a mother who will always play a primary role in sketching our cultural identity: the Greek nature.
The tearing becomes more aching; when overimposing simultaneously the traditions of the deities one upon the other, the artist’s skillful performance of aesthetic and arrangement procedures becomes tangible in a lucid feeling of absence, in a vacuum that becomes frenzy to repossess, in a new hierarchy of the Myth.
Mrs Di Nunzio proved able to add an enriching new meaning to the implicit secondary details in the history of divinities, such as had never surfaced beforehand. Her interpretations of gods and goddesses are additions in feeling.
An example of her ability to grasp the unexpressed potential in the Greek, Roman or Etruscan mythologies is represented by the work featuring goddess Strenia, symbolising the new Year together with prosperity and good luck. In a game of cross-references that is charming “per se” because of the resulting changes in meaning, Strenia replaces Janara, now obliged to count the salt grains that, in the artist’s view, stand out like cocaine strips suggesting decay and disorientation. So much so that Zeus, caught in a Visconti-styled atmosphere, looks subdued, no longer able to exert power, a fully Italian-styled, de-legitimated and tired god.
The whole project of Mrs Adelaide Di Nunzio is interwoven with this bearing symbolic structure that acquires additional layers while passing through the centuries and finally reaches us with that decaying implication and with renewed strength, almost as if all those gods and goddesses were ready for a revolt, to take back that secret and become incomparable again.
Before our eyes the stillness of the Olympus shows up at the moment of the break between Apollo's and Dyonisus’ spirits; an Adam and a Saint (the Madonna) are placed as wardens of this split and of the monotheism that does not stop exerting its pressure seconding the apparent and functional irreconcilability between the rational and the metaphysic worlds.
Mrs. Di Nunzio scans the feminine archetypes and the bi-sexed nature of the divine. The tip of Apollo’s arrow with its hyacinth-red (a heart perhaps) aims at the spectator, as a promising love threat in the memory of that yearning love that made the Arts’ god eager for the young Hyacinth, and whom he unwillingly wounded to death during a contest of discus throwing. Charon shows his feminine nature, soaked in a naivety opposite to how tradition depicts him, i.e. glum and full of enlightened ferociousness (nomen omen). The artist covers the Sybil with grapes; she requested immortality to Apollo but she forgot to also demand the eternal youth; therefore, this is an attempt to hide her will-be oldness and compensate her feminine instinctive naivety. Dyonisus, the offspring of Demeter and Zeus’ incest, becomes three in an orgy of glares and frenzy, revealing that he declined from his nature of firstborn in the Universe, a threefold of Bacchus who lost their purpose.
Lacan claims that “the symbol is a hole”, a gap, a sense of absence; Mrs. Adelaide Di Nunzio’s works have the merit to remind us about that absence with great expertise.
(by Antonio Maiorino Marrazzo)
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