Galleria Studio G7 hosts Fuso Orario, a solo exhibition by Letizia Cariello curated by Leonardo Regano.
Fuso Orario is an investigation into the subtle boundary between inner and outer space, between what binds the physical body and the spiritual body, succeeding in highlighting an occult anatomy of being that results in perceptive potential, a research inspired by the principles of Spiritual Geometry, by theosophical and neo-Platonic theories.
Seven Volumes make up the large wall installation; arranged according to a star pattern that traces a map of the sky that witnesses the moment of encounter between Jupiter and Saturn, the Volumes ideally represent the interaction between the seven different subtle planes of human nature, explored here according to the individual colours that make their luminous radiation manifest. A marble is placed on each Volume according to the gradation of tone of the polyhedron itself; the calendar engraved on the marble surface links the perception of earth time, in its different time zones, to both an archaic ego time and the ethereal world. The concept of time, understood as control over existence, is annihilated in the confrontation with the unconscious and the uncertainty of a spiritual world that can only be perceived. The installation is reflected in the site-specific work Sistema Sottile (Subtle System), a wall embroidery that for the first time the artist has created with threads of different colours, bound together to construct a geometric figure that takes up the pattern of the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction.
LETIZIA CARIELLO FUSO ORARIO
curated by Leonardo Regano
Friday 9 April to 18 June 2021
by appointment only, write to info@galleriastudiog7.it
Galleria Studio G7, Bologna
When the child a child was,
it was time for the following questions:
Why am I myself and why not you?
Why am I here, and why not there?
When did time begin and where does space end?
Is life under the sun not merely a dream?
Is what I see and hear and smell
not the naked shine of a world before the world?
Is there really evil and are there people
who really are evil ones?
How can it be, that I, who am I,
before I became, wasn’t,
and that someday I, who am I,
will no longer be I, who once became?
Peter Handke, Song of Being a Child, 1987
The poet asks himself: why am I me, and why not you? why am I here, and why not there? when does time begin, and where does space end? And just as the poet does, in our everyday lives we find ourselves wondering why things happen, wondering what the real reason is for everything that happens around us. In time, we learn that the meaning of our individual and spiritual growth lies in the constant need to ask questions, even if many of them will never be answered. And we persist in the search for a logical response because we are convinced that even for the greatest and most complex questions about our existence there is an explanation, albeit elusive but still traceable. We experience our human imperfection as a condemnation to which we do not surrender; we make it a stimulus by continuing to wonder about the mysteries of the infinitely small and the infinitely large, to find their causes and purpose. And we ask ourselves how that light breeze, that tenuous sensation, that gentle jolt, can succeed in moving the entire course of our existence. If the poet asks himself the questions, the director gives us a vision, that of a sad and grey city made up of men who wonder about the mysteries of life and calm their anxieties between the pages of the books in the great Central Library in search of answers; and of angels, of spiritual entities that accompany them in this search, listen to them and support them in the crucial phases of their existence.
Letizia Cariello’s work confronts us with a question, which is the same one that haunts the poet. When does time begin, and where does space end? And here the artist seems to suggest an answer. Letizia makes herself the intermediary of a broader will, for a Truth that is intimate and, at the same time, absolute. “Beware, it is no longer I who speak!”, Hanna warned her companions with whom she shared the experience of war and hiding from the Nazi terror. Through her, the Light manifested itself, guiding and instilling courage in the whole group of friends to survive despite the horror around them. And like Hanna, the protagonist of Gitta Mallasz’s Dialogues with the Angel, Letizia elevates her art to an instrument of communication with the Other, to a connection with that higher reality that governs our flow of existence.
Cariello’s art, it is not wrong to say, is an art of sharing. Each of his works is a device for connecting with the deepest self. His thought is pure and moved by a radical force. Cariello creates by performing a shamanic act and in this she recalls the lesson of Beuys, his way of relating to the spiritual and physical energies that govern the sensitive world. Certainly Cariello does not investigate the primary of nature as his German colleague does, but prefers to experience the spiritual connections in the intimacy of a home and in the confrontation with her closest affections. And so the continuous confrontation with the sacred takes on importance for her: a reference that she finds casually in a gesture of daily life or that she voluntarily seeks through the practice of isolation and silence; or that she investigates in the continuous relationship with the Saint, or the human being who on earth has brought traces of contact with the divine and who has thus suggested new strategies for the search for Truth.
In Fuso Orario, the artist retraces the extraordinary mystical passage we are going through as we enter the Age of Aquarius, the mythical age that will initiate a process of rebirth for the common consciousness and a spiritual evolution capable of leading us to full awareness. On the walls of the Galleria Studio G7 Cariello proposes a site-specific work entitled Sistema Sottile (Subtle System), in which the weave of interwoven threads re-proposes the image of the map of the sky as it was last 21 December, the moment of the great astral conjunction between Jupiter and Saturn that announced the entry into this new era.
Sistema Sottile is a manifesto-work, radical in its stance on Letizia Cariello’s previous research. With this work, the artist marks a watershed that prepares us for a renewed creative experience, a culmination that feeds on the experiments of recent years. The red thread that has always distinguished her work is for the first time coloured and differentiated in a meeting of seven different colours that reproduce the subtle vibrations of the energetic manifestation of the human soul. The reference, as the title suggests, is to the energy complex on which the multiple dimensions of the human being are grafted, to the spiritual, emotional, physical and mental light that she is able to emanate and which is a direct extension of his soul outside the body. Following the path of knowledge indicated by the Essenian theories, the artist places before us the vision of an energy that is cosmic and spiritual, that resonates in the universe and whose echoes echo in our Ego.
The same astral pattern of 21 December is mirrored in the second installation in the exhibition. On the opposite wall are seven sculptures that continue the series of Volumes, works that in their essence and form for the artist recall the principles of Spiritual Geometry. At the top of each solid, Cariello places his Calendars, here proposed as engraved polychrome marble discs. The sequence of numbers and letters on them reveals the sense of a personal meditation on time and its passing. The hardest of materials welcomes in its firmness the trace of a concept that is elusive by its very definition. What we find sculpted on the marble, however, is the time that Bergson indicates of consciousness, a subjective time, made up of a continuous and non-decomposable flow of events, as opposed to the rigour of scientific measurement. What Letizia is talking about is the time of the Ego, which includes in its flow the concession to error, to reconsideration, to missed intention. Its flow is neither linear nor circular. It is a tumultuous coming and going that relates to the rhythm of one’s own intimacy. It is an individual time zone that marks the difference between our existences. Cariello sets himself a goal, a date in the future, and achieves it by recounting his inner journey in that alphanumeric code that we see engraved on the marble. We must not make the mistake of wanting to decipher it because this is not the right way to read Letizia’s work. Even the thread element takes us back to the dimension of time, becoming a metaphor for it; through it, the objects reconnect and recreate a relationship with each other. It is not Cariello who grafts this relationship; the artist merely interprets it. For Cariello, the thread is an instrument that highlights the relationships that already exist between things and people. It does not serve to create relations in an arbitrary manner because the artist does not want to set himself up as the Demiurge of his own world.
Letizia’s art is what we might call concrete, firmly anchored in the reality of sensory experience and a new perception of its complexity.
Calendars, objects of affection, trees, musical instruments, images: Letizia links them together following the idea of a time and a space that comes from her interiority, from the feeling of what she calls “the mind’s chamber”, following Catherine’s example. The experience of the Sienese Mystique showed us the way to an inner place where space and time are different and where one is in contact only with oneself. There, in that refuge for the soul, we are able to perceive ourselves for what we are, for our essence of being timeless and out of space, without a before and without an after, but connected in the continuous flow of existence.
And so the poet’s questions come to mind again, his search for a complete meaning to our presence in the flow of time and eternal space. How can it be that I, who am I, was not there before I became, and that, once, I, who am I, will no longer be what I am? The poet asks himself this question and, deep down, so do we. And the artist looks at us, and thus seems to come back to suggest an answer that she does not know but of which she becomes the intermediary. In those forms that Cariello creates, guided by her feelings, we thus succeed for a moment in approaching a small clue to this indefinable dilemma.
Leonardo Regano