Carmelo Zagari The Storyteller’s Dream
Until March 7th, 2022, with Carmelo Zagari’s exhibition, the Royale Abbey of Fontevraud is hosting a collection of works that mark a career spanning almost four decades, as well as others created for the occasion, centred on the question of heritage and transmission.
Portraits, self-portraits, vanities, landscapes, nativities, dreams, epics, Carmelo Zagari occupies a disconcerting space, difficult to circumscribe, which falls within several genres and seems to obey several solicitations. Painting remains his main preoccupation, but he never loses the opportunity to rub shoulders with the diverse assets of sculpture, performance, video and installation. He has no difficulty in acknowledging filiations, debts and influences, and mobilises them to serve his own research, amalgamating them into an initiatory journey that takes the risk of getting lost in a proliferation of signs, scenes and references in order to better reach an intimate knowledge. What this work tries to share with us is that each human trajectory is situated between the visible and the invisible, order and disorder, the sacred and the profane, that its material is made up of densities and transparencies that cross and interpenetrate, and that a fundamental negotiation takes place by bringing together the reminders of an ordinary daily life and the flexible, enchanted plurality of the coefficients of dilation and concentration of forms of recognition and transgression.
WHERE YOU COME FROM
Childhood forged his artistic determining. It imposed the family, the tutelary figures, the atmospheres, the effervescence of the sounds and words of the people of the South. Family is belonging, the value of celebration, but it is permanence. Of Calabrian origin, his father was a coal miner in the Loire basin. He took early retirement to take care of his son after his mother died. He was ten years old. The two spent a lot of time together, in the garden, the place of renewal, invention and continuity, which refers to the only formula that is worthwhile: “Never forget where you come from”. It was an incentive to progress, and shaped his journey: “Where we come from, no one can take that away from us. So let’s move forward. We are modest, but the magic is there somewhere, we must believe in it no matter what.”
The father was a storyteller, in the tradition of oral transmission in his mountain village. Transmission “is to keep the word given, it is also to share it”.The father’s voice has the ability to conjure up “The Dragon with Seven Heads”, “The Magic Lantern” or “The Perfect Circle of Giotto.”The heritage is there: a mixture of spontaneity, naivety and ingenuity. The tale regenerates the endless game of repetition and difference. It consists in reviving a memory according to the inspiration, the circumstances and the audience. Zagari refers to this story telling as the possibility “of being part of a general narrative of a world in perpetual rebirth that surprises [him] with gentleness or commotion. The human being is summoned, between strength and fragility, life and death, one must die to be reborn.” At the age of five he discovered in a dictionary the Portrait of the Marquise de la Solana by Goya, the neutral background and the enormous flower of pink ribbon in the hair. He was also marked by the graphics and illustrations of his first method of learning to read. Drawing brought him the necessary resources to participate in the dreamlike, the spectacular and the prowess of the shortcut of his father’s stories. He practiced it like a writing at once implicit and explicit, which opened the door of a refuge to him, where he plunged into the depth and the power of the poetic imagination, tamed his fears and tended to his wounds with unbridled, unexpected images: “I image everything that is said to me. I advance in the intimate with certainty. I have the conviction that the inexpressible is true.”
For Zagari, “Painting itself is of no importance”. What matters is what he decides to construct with it and therefore to be at the centre of his investigative operations. He takes hold of it and never lets go. He assigns it a human scale, the gestures of maximum extension, and approaches it with the impetus of rapid execution, without repentance. He invigorates it with the emotional resonance of colour to accentuate the memory or the retinal burn, the red-hot mark of black and white: “A warmer black stretched will tend towards ochres, a black with white towards bluish metallic grey. A moonlit night appears with its shadows, its subliminal undulations, the past and the present can be revived.” He marks it with a constellation of repeated signals of a vocabulary of leaves, snakes, flowers, skulls, musical skeletons, masks, hats, ducks, wagons, aubergines and
tattoos. He teaches it darkness or distance in his actions, where he practices it “blind” or “with a pole”. He settles in the heart of his reactor and takes all the space necessary to act like a monkey, to become a clown, to designate the horse as a force of stability, of anchorage, to accompany the particular exhilaration of birds, to recognize the extent of the gaze of wolves, deer, dogs and cows, and thus to transform “his aberrations into acts of freedom and meaning”.
INTERACTIONS AND RICOCHETS
Zagari strives to discover himself in the preoccupation of recognising and questioning the cruel contradiction of existence. His work depends on a necessary need to take action, to take a stand. The enterprise thus consists in confronting the anxiety linked to any form of emergence, the violence of antagonisms and constraints, and in taking into account the conditions of a precarious, threatened human adventure. He creates opportunities and tools for himself to conceive a territory in keeping with his expectations and his audacity, to transpose the usual meaning onto another register, one that is both more unstable and more rigorous, to enter an imaginary dimension of the indispensable, to cross to the other side of the mirror and return.
He channels encounters, words, and emotions to produce surging, disturbing images. His approach is first and foremost a work of interaction and ricochets, that is to say, an act of inscription that involves attitudes, behaviour and ideas. Hence the urgency to produce, to execute and to take sides, the urgency to conclude in order to escape illustration, cunning and seduction, the urgency to respond to the order of a place, a story or a vision. Hence, finally, the monumentality of his works, which impels a more dizzying, unpredictable composition, and a more fantastical exploration.
This work teems with allusions, confluences, echoes and peregrinations. Zagari not only manages this memory, but also gives meaning to its presence, to the place it occupies. He extends and regenerates memories. He displaces, brings together, multiplies and thereby situates himself. He thus creates a sensitive sphere, which far from being a prisoner of its reference points and figures, constantly renews them and remains in constant gestation. His universe oscillates between a soft material that harmonises, stretching the image towards a suavity, an explicit sensual pleasure, an immediate, stimulating beauty, and a rough, harsh material that is charged with electricity and equivocation, exacerbating the impression of shock and injury. Inhabited by those close to him, incited by vibrations and personal preoccupations, his painting is linked to a time that flows like a period of life: a “grace” that emerges from the very thickness of life, that speaks of what constitutes it, of the source that generates it. Zagari experiments with this vital impulse in reverie, for what is important is to find a balance, however rudimentary, between nocturnal unconsciousness and consciousness in the light of day. To dream here is to become mobile, to knot and unknot enigmas, to embrace the contours of beings and things, to become impregnated with their substance, and to lend oneself to mutation and its emotional escalation.
Translation: Chloé Baker
Didier Arnaudet is an art critic and exhibition curator. He is currently preparing the first edition of the art biennial of the Médoc wine route due to take place Spring 2022.