Under the high vaults of Luigi Ferranti's printing house, in via Arco del Monte 99 A, the only historic engraving art workshop still active in Rome, a forest was born!
These are the engraved and printed images that make up the 'A L B E R I' folder. Here the tree is a symbol and metaphor of vital processes that each of the artists has meditated and carried into their works. Eight papers, made with ancient and modern techniques, woodcut, etching, photolith with aquatint, ceramolle.
Together, they allude, through signs and words, to those natural structures inside and outside of us that have deep roots in our unconscious (even collective), a thick or flexible stem that rises and carries lymph and nourishment towards branches / arms open to the light and to the world, receptive and rustling of leaves, flowers and fruits of a thousand shapes, a place of nests, leaps and songs and much more.
For Eclario Barone, xylography, with the use of sharp gouges that leave the furrows of the white, is to come into contact with the millenary woodworking of the craftsman and sculptor who made tools and gods of trees. Its trees become inextricable woods caught in the cold and heat of the seasons or marked by human behavior that is not always correct. For Luigi Caflisch the tree is Nature that meets Myth, the genius loci that is embodied in nymphs and subtle spirits that are part of the classical cultural heritage but without the academic filter of formal static. His is a happy pantheism made up of superhuman encounters in the apparent simplicity of etching which, in the rendering of its plates, manifests itself as flowing and gurgling water or wind stirring clouds and branches. Silvia Guidi, with words / leaves, is tuned to rhythms and synaesthetic assonances that together reveal 'the voice of the trees'. The ceramolle holds the green ink of the verses to trace eurythmic calligraphy, a hall program for feathered singers. Finally, the photoliths by Paolo Porelli, almost frames resulting from the useless pursuit of a god, stratify images of gods and leaves. Daphne is no longer even a shrub anymore but captures its victory by incorporating its pursuer by merging with the Apollonian form. His is almost an omen, the mute cry of a natural world that strongly reaffirms its reasons by overturning usurped anthropocentric perspectives. In the dim light of the ancient printing house, the works, a small constellation, relaunch subtle threads of meaning and at the same time interact with the space of Luigi Ferranti, with the printing machines, with the papers of Vespignani, Sughi, Attardi, true tutelary deities, mighty trees with deep roots and large foliage.
Eclario Barone 2021
