Chronochromes of Feeling

Alissa Bruschi, Giuliana Paolucci, and Vito Di Bella

Time

Mirror of Life

Three artists who are different from one another but share a common denominator that defines their art: time! Alissa works with materials, salvaging roots and tree trunks and transforming them into evocative works of art; as a mosaic artist, she uses fragments of ceramic and glass, assembling them to create biomorphic creatures with a vascular appearance, pulsating with organs that seem alive. New life sprouts from the trunk. The Arcadian fable of the lively grove merges with the compelling aesthetics of anatomical macabre in the contemplation and ecstasy of the memento mori: the relic becomes a cabinet of curiosities and an object of worship. The reflection seeks to explore the meaning of life. Mystery resonates within the extreme refinement of the installation-sculpture.The artist belongs to the world of Goya, for whom intellectual and formal elegance veiled the enigma: his portraits concealed the unease and anguish of a society based on appearances. Alissa lays bare our decadent age, the result of a perverse and obsessive aesthetic fanaticism that has lost sight of the authentic essence of life. The idea springs from a branch or a root that is only seemingly lifeless.  Amid the ruins of Piranesi, mysterious figures move about—they are nostalgic ghosts of the glorious life that once filled those ancient streets, now largely buried under mounds of earth and marked by the inexorable passage of time. The beauty of the anatomical wax models created by Gaetano Giulio Zumbo of Syracuse for Ferdinando de’Medici—and now preserved at the Museo della Specola in Florence—shows how the brilliant sculptor molded wax around real bones in a bizarre aesthetic whim: Alissa envelops the tree of life in her magical compositions, bringing it back to life; a resurrection takes place in the sculptural and scenographic reworking of the fragment. Life returns to the grove of Arcadia. Giuliana, even before she is an artist, is an aquatic creature: her paintings embody an identification with the liquid element. Water is the mirror, the measure of time. Giuliana does not seek the solidity of space but rather the changeability generated by water’s natural prism in the multiplicity of shifting reflections: the artist observes the world through this special lens; her gaze can truly be described as “maritime.” Space and time intersect and coincide for a moment on the canvas, and that is precisely the moment to capture the truth of a feeling, an emotion, and a sensation.experience, which Giuliana actually shared with her son, becomes an otherworldly and mythical apparition within the intimate, crystallized family setting of a suspended reality that belongs to the realm of dreams. The great fish becomes an initiation into a new dimension, just as it was for Jonah’s whale, which would later be transformed into Collodi’s gigantic shark: rebirth takes place within the belly of the enormous creature. Only in the flow of time, by contrast, does one rediscover one’s being: the solidity of the self is felt and perceived in the process of becoming. Vito draws us in with his beaches: on a day by the sea, Apollo, the sun god, bursts onto the scene in his chariot; the presence of the sun—that is, of the god—on a pleasant summer day ignites the spark of the sacred rite, during which the blazing, divine power is unconsciously communicated to all,  thus generating before our very eyes the apotheosis of the Golden Age:  the sweet idleness, characteristic of that precious and irreplaceable golden moment, takes hold of souls and bodies, transfiguring them into epiphanies and expressions of the divine in art. Two male figures, one red and the other green, lie side by side on the beach: they represent a devout homage to classical sculpture, embodying its enchanting symmetries and harmonies, yet at the same time they bring to mind the vermilion figures of Matisse’s “La Danse” in its celebration of life as happiness. Vito’s smaller works are microcosms that embody the vastness of the universe: within the small, everything expands and broadens; the whole is concentrated in the silent expressions of the figures who, through their movement, almost imperceptibly convey their moods and mental statest.The scene set in an outdoor café—entirely rendered in shades of green—is poignant and gently persuasive, drawing its life from the transparency of its emotional and psychological waves. A subtle sensibility of vibrant beauty takes shape in the miniature painting of the three musicians playing guitars: their identities, though sophisticatedly defined by their postures, blend into the background and appear as an extension and continuation of nature. A pervasive sense of ritual emerges from the works of Vito, a lover of nature and its sensory and magical sacredness. He acts as both director and actor in his staged paintings. To conclude, let us return to time, which lends rhythm and incisive cadence to the works of these significant artists: for Alissa, it is the time for reflection on life and its relics; Giuliana perceives time as a revealer of profound truths that are only seemingly transitory; and finally, for Vito, time is that of theater, the Sacred, and Myth, which seeks protection and refuge in everyday life.  I share this enlightening thought with Novalis from *The Disciples of Sais*: “This otherworldly voluptuousness of the liquid—and ultimately, all pleasant sensations—are varied dissolutions, movements of those primordial waters within us.”

Giuseppe Ussani d’Escobar