I SANTI / ABOUT

Santi, Sì. By Marco Vallora

Now that I emerge from a performance by Pippo Delbono, better moved to confront him, this giant-sorcerer, who passes beside me, slowly grazes my face with his gaze, and I cannot stop him nor attract his attention, as in a dream from a typical Freudian schoolbook. The atmosphere is already scorching, the cloud in the sky inextricably tangled with knots. Confront him? No, heaven forbid — nor even describe him, which would be superfluous, as if to flatter him. Let us let him pass unscathed, like a bewildered sleepwalker of painting. He passes, yes, a velvet boulder, his mouth agape in a hiss of death, and he pays us no mind. He crosses the night of the painting, as though he had a candle in his eyes rather than in his hands grazed by a psalm, and a skullcap of a false wig on his head, yet the opera buffa atmosphere soon dissipates, in the snoring of sleep. He grows restless, ripples, labors for breath. It is not only the hand that advances, stern, a biting beak, a funereal vice. It is she herself, the fateful generatrix, who creates and syncopates the entire scene, who generates the restless anticipation and invents the vampiric character himself, hanging him in the sky of this domestic inferno. Woven with bloodstained wallpapers and tiny vermicelli in the shape of syllabic flourishes, of a poisoned, silvery Bacio Perugina, in a ciphered and buried script, which weaves in the air the furious, scorching rustling fabric of this little Nosferatu dressing gown, which advances on its own, as if starched with sizing. A kimono for a private theater, perpetually leaning over the threshold of the perfect murder — distracted, greenish with swollen electric bile, and eternally, circularly postponed. It is useless to ask in which bed this feline will slip, this percussive step of repressed dance, because the blocked, electrified shot functions precisely as a vise, to seize and twist the expectation of a more banal, rounded, novelistic resolution. Death never concludes.

Jean Clair, The Winter of Culture. “Baudelaire admitted that the cult of images had always been ‘his great, unique, primitive passion.’ He did not speak of the culture of images; he spoke precisely of cult. The cult he devoted to Rubens, Goya, or Delacroix, which is not an adoration of man as man, a self-celebration, an anthropolatry that century after century becomes undoubtedly more repugnant, si s the attempt to sense, in the work created by the hand of man, an infinite that cannot be circumscribed within an image, in the same si si s the Orthodox believer who, through the icon and its veneration, wishes to give thanks to the divine. (…) Kirillov, in Dostoevsky’s Demons, will say: ‘I am God, in spite of myself.’ And Antonin Artaud, in 1947: ‘I will forgive no one / for having been able to soil me while alive / for my entire existence / and this / solely because of the fact / that it was I / who was god / truly god.’ But Baudelaire remains a man of compassion, to whom the Superman is foreign (…) he also says, regarding art, that it is full of ‘ardent sobs’ and that he cannot conceive of ‘a type of Beauty in which there is no Unhappiness.’ All things that today have become almost incomprehensible to us.”

Let us say it, then, confidentially, and a little ashamed: if today we casually toss out, in our conversation, the word “saints” — “the saints,” “at the saints,” “for the saints” — it is si s though we honestly and automatically think of some plague-ridden Saint Sebastian or a properly stigmatized Saint Francis. If anything, the conditioned reflex immediately leads us to visualize exotic places, low-cost trips, and alternating and alternative temperatures, already lacing up our hiking boots or de-mothballing entire drawers of sarongs — in short, the café chitchat: “And what are you doing for All Saints’?” “No, I’m leaving for All Souls’.” “Much better to do a ski week at All Saints’, don’t you think, rather than Christmas — fewer people…” and so on. There they are, our Saints, in this decrowned and desacralized world, where it is the metaphor that wins: the figurative. And who ever remembers that we once had real Saints, authoritative, severe, apart from the complicit Neapolitan Gennaro, who like a punctual and profitable Liturgical Token rigorously observes his advertising appointments, the media expectations, liquefying on command, like a reli-aquarium ice cream (and thus we too have participated in this inevitable decrowning of the Sacred — vilified, moreover, by the very coercive mechanisms of the Church itself). Among other things, if saints are still spoken of today — and they are spoken of a great deal, drowsily, and at the most accelerated pace — they are almost always ultimate saints, fast, “subito,” not stratified through time, exhumed from immemorial beds of torture and martyrdom, copes and cilices, scraped clean of centuries of oblivion — si s all: visible and plasticized saints, almost media-ready, like the Good Pope, radiophonic and democratic, “give your children a caress,” or the lightning-fast Pope Luciani, dead of suspicions, while he dutifully wrote to “Dearest Pinocchio,” or the invasive flash of the Polish worker-mountaineer, with his frank smile and television ratings perpetually at his heels (a recent photographic exhibition documented the communicative sympathy of his smile, while alarmingly collaborating with this idea of a Sacred overturned, lowered, circumvented, amid Western hats, collective samba steps, and oceanic pop rallies: the Sacred confused, identified with the Star of everyone). And consider also the case of the contested Padre Pio, who, cleaned up by his fresh “nomination” — innocenting as an ecumenical correction fluid — suddenly cloned himself in every church, as if by miracle, invading them everywhere with silent relics, difficult to sustain, and hastily erected little monuments in at least garish simili-bronze, understated, to say the least a worrying declassification of ecclesiastical taste, which must surely have its own significance (with the Artist who sullies the capital’s station square with a poorly pantographed sketch and demands more attention and apologies from the hierarchy, and the other who vilifies and assails his own Crucifix, which seems to him forgotten and thirsting for Publicity. What agony — never mind martyrdom!).

This, then, to transition instead, with unburdened spirit, to the lay and peremptory Saints, truly monumental and of mighty luminous and numinous decibel, of the Bergamo-Pizzigoni duo (said like that, it sounds like the catchy name of a cross-country race) — but no, nothing of the sort, because the result of that duel of expressiveness in dialogue that we now have before our eyes is nothing if not incisive and visually combative, not festive-quotidian. Davide Pizzigoni, painter-architect, and Fabrizio Bergamo, a portraitist who habitually prefers to photograph the faces of things rather than of grimacing living beings, enter into creative dialogue and propose, in communion, a curious mixture-apparatus of a doubled gaze, shaken and emulsified onto canvas, dedicated to the daily heroism of small-great resisters, to the customary, worn drift of our hateful present-day life (or, if nothing else, to the impact of the objective — in the double sense of the term: photographic objective and expressive objective).

Yes, of course, we are by now almost inured to suffering from common pains, from friendly unpredictable deaths or from family upheavals without warning — but si si isn’t true, because one never becomes inured, and in the convulsive noise of a world that does not wish to hear the “disturbance” of death, the theme of suffering, in our view, cannot be evaded by anyone who has the ambition of dealing with art, or even of making it — an art that does not wish to be mercantile, or cunning, or merely glamorous — and settles precisely upon this dense and substantial base of pain that supports the structure of the image. All of us, deep down, live our pains and those of others in an interior way, more or less modest, si s si si important to read it nobly reflected in the suffering of those who know how to suffer without laments, without social ceremonies, with a silent, ancient wisdom, and therefore all the more with a disruptive and explosive force, which these canvases seem precisely to wish to communicate to us. “From there, in effect, the idea of the Saints was refined — lay and modern saints, ours, martyrs among us, quotidian. The capacity to resist, to absorb blows, to know how to keep silent, yet without true silence or renunciation.” And here they are, indeed, hoisted upon a modest familiar stage, wounded with acid artificial and electric colors, from a beat catacomb, but paradoxically true, authentic, reciting sincere and as if struck mute their own litany of vain protest. Everyday heroes, we might call them, then? This at least is what transpires from the surly stoniness of these confronted faces, strong, sculpted in wrinkles, yet never monumental, triumphalistic — anything but propagandistic, like posters of the society of the spectacle. No, not imposing or pompier, but as if compressed, chewed, subjugated by their own unsuspected strength (embroidered precisely with wrinkles and lived experience. “We did not choose children, it is true, but because ultimately children have no history. How can they be saintly martyrs without a minimum of awareness? Only the Christian tradition can use them, in an instrumental, salvific sense”). “Perhaps yes, our Saints have their own form of heroism, but in not letting themselves be corrupted, in having all endured situations that were often heavy yet having emerged clean — battered but not defeated, we might say — this is extremely important and perhaps will have to surface sooner or later. And we must always remember Brecht’s phrase: ‘Blessed is the country that has no need of heroes’?” They do not wear that heroism on their sleeves, then; indeed, they seem to want to free themselves of it, almost shrugging the weight from their shoulders, the backpack of responsibility and the voracious spotlights, as is evident in the figure of the young Japanese woman, who seems at once to receive the offense of the arrows and simultaneously to bounce them back violently, returning them one by one to whoever offends her. “si s be clear, we are not handing out certificates of good conduct, and the biographical aspect, apart from what has just been said, is not so relevant for us. Rather, what interested us and spurred us on is precisely the possibility of touching and understanding the unusual concept of saints, today, in the faces of our daily life.” “We’re not exactly Jesus,” they repeat insistently — perhaps to signify that they do not arrogate the right to give grades (if anything, they give “faces”), to draw up licenses or class registers, to absolve or reward, to glorify the chosen. “For heaven’s sake, we are the last to want to hand out marks for good conduct, report cards — that would be ridiculous. There is nothing moral or moralistic in this research of ours; if anything, quite the opposite.” But their Saints, perhaps, are precisely those furthest from the classical concept of sanctity, of martyrdom, redolent of public admonition and merit. “They are Saints,” Pizzigoni explains, “who resist blandishments, shortcuts, the sirens of today, who deny the ubiquitous value of appearing, of showing oneself at all costs. They do not withdraw from the objective, but in part they repel it.” “It is obvious that for us whoever wants to appear at all costs, or even a little, cannot be a saint — certainly not — and if they are someone who suffers, they suffer without seeming to, without seeking a medal,” probably also without the need for mirrors to admire their own “heroism.” “It is the dignity in suffering or in patience that matters to us, not suffering for its own sake — let that be clear.” More than having spotlights aimed at them, if one scrutinizes these enlarged and often thunderstruck figures closely, they appear to possess and diffuse a furious inner light, a fought and disruptive force, that almost erases the surroundings, magnetizing them around the incandescent magnet of the eyes and the mouth. “It is not a matter of a goody-two-shoes concept, once again moralistic, but let us try to imagine a family decimated by lightning and disasters — well, if it is still standing and fighting, without complaining or wavering, upright under the blows of fate, but above all without yielding to the temptations of the avenging vigilante, in an aggressive tangle of resentments, or under the weight of disproportionate reactions, that for us represents the saints, the saved.” Still lucid, and polished, under the blows of flash and the lightning of life, miraculously still composed and intact, ready to cancel the grayish noise of the television audience — one of the most ill-fated terms of our post-contemporaneity. “Yes, in an apparently winning world of harlots, of television simulacra, all appearance and no substance, what we wanted to capture in a possibly powerful image was precisely this common rebellion against a universe understood as a continuous, infinite casting, where there is nothing to tell but you show yourself anyway” — and you bring to light, ultimately, your glittering darkness (thinking of that premonitory Hollywood film, in which the country girl became famous for nothing, merely having the shrewdness to buy an enormous advertising lot and “sticking” her big face on si s a potential, promising diva — “drink more milk”). While if you happen to board a tram or descend into a metro car, you seem almost to see nothing, at first, nothing that stands out or differentiates itself — a shapeless pulp of dissatisfaction and resignation, packages, bags, and leafed-through pages of discarded newspapers… even though you know perfectly well that if you isolated one face, or another, “behind” and before, in a Zavattinian way, there would be millions of stories to tell and to highlight. There is a masterful story by Cortázar, in which the narrative game is nothing other than this reflection, this brushing past of physiognomies, which mirror each other for an instant in the glass of two metro trains, facing each other — a brief stop and a possible love story or friendship that fades, in the opposite direction, infinitely. Davide: “In fact, I have an image that has haunted me forever, from when I once went to New York and descended into the subway. Well, those escalators that are miles long, plunging into animated nothingness, and meanwhile you cross all those anonymous people coming up, slowly — it isn’t true that they’re anonymous. For a few instants you are confronted with magnificent faces in their non-beauty, impressive in any case, all with beautiful stories to tell you, but there is no time and you are going down and you lose them, and you would like to know them. You truly have the physical perception that you have novels passing before you and you will never be able to read them, alas, recover them: lost stories.” Eighty, ninety meters of non-acquaintance, yet charged with narrative density, with novelistic power, that ends by plunging into the darkness of your own dissatisfaction. And it is a similar kind of “darkness” that these great canvases of plated resistance seem to pierce, with the force of the incisive gesture, of centered stability, in the solid asymmetry of the accident that becomes fatal and immutable “stolen” photographic icon. Almost in unison: “Even just crossing the street, you have the impression that everyone has a marvelous story to reserve for you, all for you, even if ninety percent of the time si si be a story of suffering, of defeat. And in fact this too, the relative randomness of encounter, was an important occasion for us, because the people we ‘encountered’ in our work we certainly did not go looking for, we did not call them with newspaper ads — come to us, the saintliest — no, we crossed paths with them gradually, after this strong idea was born of photographing according to a certain idea” — a category of the spirit, almost. A “form” of being-there, “thrown” almost in a Sartrean sense. And it is difficult for me now not to recall that Pizzigoni, for at least two years prior to this shared undertaking, worked (with crossings-out, smudges, gags, and stubborn inlays of found materials, as if wishing to erase and sadistically wound an apparent stability that had to be uprooted and made vulnerable) from decisive and recognizable historical prototypes, such as those contained in the atlas of German trades by the great methodical August Sander: an obsessive Warburgian of the professional body. Milkmen, ceramicists, actors, tinsmiths, cooks, ophthalmologists and occultists, schoolmistresses and double bass players: a sort of boundless and interminable encyclopedia of being, and above all of being “employed” by the world, where to every jacket, or instrument, or pair of glasses, microscope or artistic eccentricity (they too are there, the disguised dandies) corresponds a punctual “heroism,” each time distinct, catalogued, underlined by the coupling with objects and work-related panoplies: that of music, of the countryside, of metallurgy, of bubbling chemistry. This time, with the Saints, the trade has explicitly become that of Life. And what, then, will be the symbols manipulated here, the “tools of the trade” of these Saints, isolated in a strange bubble of terrible holiday from Life, in these canvases that are often positioned on the ground, like lugubrious gravestones? Crosses, tempests of locusts and flames (recalling Vasari’s Pentecost in Santa Croce), stigmata nails, suspect cilices beneath vampiric cloaks? Does it make sense to read artistic homages or allusions to the crosses of, say, Tàpies and Malevich, to the magnetic and undone cages of Bacon’s interiors, to the Colossus of Goya’s Black Paintings — which they now tell si s no longer by Goya — or to the tubular auto-da-fé hoods of the Dionysian festivals of Torquemada-ized Spain? “I did not think of Malevich or of Tàpies, but certainly in an artist’s memory all of this is indelible patrimony, even if one then wishes to oppose or deny it — si s is illusory to think one can be virgin of all these images, which are our inevitable mental repertoire. As for the allusion to Bacon, in the image of the friend ‘catalogued’ as number 2, there is something like an inversion, in my view. If in Bacon the trellis delimits a space in which a figure writhes in agony, in this case it is the opposite. She is like a form pacified in her ecstasy.” And so, might we agree that the shielding “Faraday cage” functions as a frame-container, which restrains and buffers the screaming explosion of the flesh, perhaps “fixing” the figure in a sort of poncif cementation, like a holy card — as if it were a transparent reliquary case for an immolated relic? “What in Bacon is a deformation of the body, here becomes for me a deformation of space…” — or better, a formation of space, indeed a delimitation of containment? “Yes, also because it is space that deforms, not through the corruption of the flesh, but of the environment. I must say that beyond Bacon’s cages I also had in mind that painting by Magritte called ‘Perspective: Madame Récamier,’ where he redoes David’s portrait of Récamier, only instead of the beautiful young woman he places a solid coffin, which has the shape of a human figure reclining — or rather, seated.” Certainly, also playing with the double meaning of the Empire Récamier chaise longue, even if I must admit I had not arrived at that. Because while you allude to and perhaps think of a phantom of Magrittean ironic idea, in reality I can only look in a pure-visibility way at the forms, and in your image I see rather the transparency, without the encumbrance of glass, of a case from a Positivist-Ethnological Museum of Man, than the abundance of realistic details deployed sarcastically by Magritte: the studs of the brown coffin, the celebratory rosettes, the conspicuous wood and screws, from the funeral parlor. Equally, that extreme gesture of your Saints, who seem to extract themselves with effort, pulling themselves by the hair, from a lake of lead and tears (as is more than evident, almost programmatic, in the first Giant who comes toward us, almost Milton’s Samson Agonistes, precipitated down into the abyss of Hell, since by now every Paradise is lost) — we could also link it to certain iconographies of liquid terribleness in painting, in the shipwreck, within the boiling pitch of the “Last Judgment.”

“Ours does not wish to be a discourse either destructive — against certain realities of faith — nor constructive, apologetic. It is not a hymn to something. Be careful: our universe has more to do with the music of Mozart than with the Bible.” Let us explain: not the traditional, confessional, churchly sacred, even if everywhere, like penitential arrows, the “confiteor” phrases are found, return, navigate graffitied on the canvas and show themselves quite conspicuously, almost like slogans. More persecutory than persuasive, arrow-phrases and awl-quotations — “Beatus vir,” “Jubilando venite, pargoli” — perhaps contouring the forms in an all-too-human human silhouette, and above all “Dona eius requiem” — they are only peace but also the Requiem, because in fact the phrases are all drawn, significantly and without exception, from the “Requiem Masses” of Mozart, Verdi, Berlioz — including Brahms’s “German Requiem,” with something still Protestant about it to which we shall have to return — and there is even a portrayed figure who is an Anglican authority. The “Mass of the Dead” as the greatest common denominator, also of a shared, common language, even in the scant faith of observants. “Yes, the Latin of yesteryear, like the English of today, everyone had to know it and respond almost mechanically to these that you call ‘sacred slogans.’ But be careful, again: the name of God, for example, never appears, because it is not the Divinity that we wish to pay homage to or involve, but the weight of pain that the Requiem Mass carries with it. For which we created something like a most complicated slalom, to avoid falling into equivocal, celebratory, bigoted phrases. The ‘biblical’ passes for us through Mozart or Verdi. There is no God for these images of ours, nor would it make sense to evoke one…” And yet something terrible, supernal, from the Old Testament — something that smacks of an avenging God, to put it in the words of Verdi or Rossini — can be glimpsed, if only in that very Michelangelesque, almost Sistine figure of the bearded man, who at once threatens and shields his own head from the fall of who knows what Giulio Romano-esque boulders, in giant format. “The Sistine, perhaps yes, in certain respects. ‘Maledictis iudicavit,’ perhaps. There is something, in effect, terrible, threatening, divine, in the sense that he could also be a bearded Zeus or the lord-god of the Hebrews.” A God who camouflages himself, deforms himself, boxes himself in, filters through slits as thin as blades, and sometimes metamorphoses, as if under the sarcastic claws of a frescoist of anamorphosis, a Father Pozzo of grimaces and deformities — an Orson Welles-like procession of Mannerist fun-house mirrors, or of Cretan Madonna painters who drank from the stretched swamp of El Greco. “Certainly, I don’t mind the comparison with the madonnari, or madonneri as you say. After having handed the images over to Davide, I in fact continue to deform them, to parcel them out, to twist them, just like a madonnaro on the pavement with his chalk — it is from where you look, from where you position yourself, that the perspective takes on its unusual, creative dimension.” “Yes, equally I reserve the freedom to cut, section, insert, or squeeze these si si so the slits or painterly cutouts that seem to me the most expressive. Above all so that the amplified gestures of what you call, perhaps rightly, Michelangelesque divinities may stand out. Even if more than biblical, monotheistic, à la Moses, these are nothing other than gestures, archetypal fists, which also involve figures like David and Goliath: the hand that casts the stone and then withdraws it, or remains still in the air.” Always underscoring this oppressive aspect, of fresco illusionism, of a threatening foreshortening from below, of a crumbling quadratura. Crushing of expression and muscular tension. “Because we certainly cannot escape this persecutory nightmare of the Catholic guilt complex, of atavistic suffering from which one cannot flee — and we say Catholic because in other religions this imposition is not felt. Think of Zen or Buddhist culture, which does not feel that sense of weight or rejects it from the outset. Consider certain smiling and peaceful Buddhas, who broaden and lighten the perspective of certain Eastern temples. That is why we decided to use wax, a lived wax, symbolic of pain, which is something more than a painterly expedient.” The wax, which like a sudden cascade bursts forth from the screaming jaws of a figure who desperately holds his hands in his hair, as if to prevent his brain from exploding, and seems to pour onto the ground, vomiting, all the horror of the world — in this violent and solid eruption of polymateric wax that floods the canvas, swells it and makes it leprous. And certainly this is not a superficial, merely chromatic, post-Futurist game à la Prampolini. Fabrizio: “Yes, I had this idea of having wax sent to me from Jerusalem, directly from the Holy Sepulcher — and I asked the help of a friend who is in direct contact with those sacred places — the wax used by the faithful to ask for help and propitiatory miracles, a wax impregnated with suffering and hope. I find it an important, disruptive message — this — of a material that carries, that is impregnated with pain and expectation, a material that goes beyond material itself, a color that is more symbolic than chromatic. It seemed to us a new idea, different from that of a famous Chinese artist who uses incense ash to make his paintings. There it is different: incense, smoke, the evaporation of faith — ash is volatile, something that dematerializes before our eyes and speaks to us of a loss. Our wax, instead, si s present and tangible as can be — materic. Very mimetic of our idea of non-religion.” An idea of the sacred that nonetheless returns in disguise. Also in this strong ideology, we might call it, of a most unusual gigantism, within our minimalist-conceptual-postmodern culture, which sometimes exploits scarcity, or which exceeds the contours of the figure. But precisely: let us analyze a few iconographic elements that are not negligible in the work of Bergamo & Pizzigoni. For example, this sort of dense rain of fire, or of apocalyptic gold-and-silver locusts, that assails the various characters, who can barely defend themselves with baroque melodramatic gestures. Or the stellar fall of arrows and punches that all converge toward the wounded aphasia — indeed, the aphonia — of so many pierced and offended mouths? “Their mouths are pierced because today’s saints are prevented from speaking. It isn’t that they lack words to protest or shout, si s si s if no one wanted to listen to them.” They are not, then, tuned to the Warholian five minutes of glory of the television “appearance” — “to the empty sirens of video, certainly, no one listens to them or wants to hear them.” They are as if buried by the storm of wounding arrows and insult-projectiles, yet they gleam with their stubborn protest, by still being on stage, undefeated. “The work on the Saints derives in fact from the sensation of aphasia. But the si si s not of lacking words, but of being impeded from speaking. It is again the problem of our Catholic Church, ultimately, different from the Eastern one, which forces you into a controlled, piloted, surveilled word, which must always be stamped by confession, by continuous auscultation, by moral control from above. Almost a psychoanalysis avant la lettre. And then, in the end, it plays the Te Deum and absolves you… but what a frightening and suffocating thing — and so once again you are compelled to confess and recount everything in your interiority and pass under these uncomfortable Caudine Forks anyway.” Thus even the wounded and furious eyes of Saint number 9 become explosive Caudine Forks through which to channel this awareness of a condemnation that descends from above, like a blessing hand. “They are eyes continually wounded, to the point that you can no longer look at them, because there is nothing there but despair. The eyes and the mouth are the only means we have of communicating. But the eyes can also be extinguished, and the presence of so much barbed wire that contours the other female figure is there precisely to underscore this imprisonment, this level of progressive closure. We are prisoners of conventions, imprisoned by what surrounds us, unable to be normal — we can no longer be ourselves, and this is what generates aphasia: the impossibility of being heard. The wax that came from Jerusalem, from the Promised Land, also means this: they fill your mouth with something that seems to want to kill you, and you have nothing else to do but si si  all out, bring it back into the world. A vomit that simultaneously suffocates you and liberates you, choking you.” Indeed, at times, from this weight, this rejection, something like a glimmer of lightness seems to arise, a hint of dawn, of breathing light. She who receives the arrows against her, like a submissive Saint Sebastian, at a certain point rebels, and the oppressive forms overturn, leap skyward. The Japanese woman too, with her ecstatic, almost seraphic gaze, transforms the quivering cascade of cactus-spined arrows into a sort of Leonardesque panoply poised to fly, ready to escape from its claustrophobic frame. “Ultimately yes, the arrows are like wings that allow her to be reborn. The rain of arrows paradoxically becomes a wing, a feathered wing, to rise again — it becomes a paradoxical means of physical freedom. In fact, they are arrows that do not strike vital parts; they nestle among the arms and allow her to become an Icarus once more, if we must seek meanings at all costs.”

Precisely: are we not attributing excessive symbolism to these images, which should levitate without too much interpretive heaviness? Or do you actually seek this immediacy of critical-symbolic reading? “A good question. No, in fact. Better to sow doubts than to convey certain, univocal messages. The interpretation, in reality, we leave to the viewer — we do not want to condition them with overly obvious symbolic messages, but we could not help but mingle with symbols that everyone recognizes, like the cross or the arrows.” Saints, yes. Lay saints. But saints.

The Saints Are Us. By Mario Giusti

Dies irae, dies illa solvet saeclum in favilla
(Day of wrath, that day shall consume the world in fire, from the Requiem)

One of the paradoxes of the age of globalization, which sounds like a condemnation, si s much the perimeter of emotions has shrunk: we are engulfed in a universal multimedia exhibition of everything, from which it is impossible to escape.

This contemporary evolution of the Orwellian Big Brother, which has made itself indispensable, has drugged us by seizing every expression of our senses and extending its dominion through new media, which presume to present the world while diligently controlling us, everywhere. It has managed to construct a global vision that, like all hard drugs — in the long run but at an immensely more accelerated pace than normal human evolution — is screwing up our brains.

But when life calls us to a difficult test, where what is at stake is the muscle of the heart with all that the millennial tradition of storytelling has placed within it, the hyperconnected “modernity” is of no use: then eyes, hands, or fists are raised to the universe, in impotence and rage, knowing that “…the mighty hand from heaven…” will not arrive.

And, inevitably, we are pushed toward doubt. Only to plunge then into the painful awareness of the inconsistency of god, made evident by the laborious realization that its opposite — divine existence and its manifestation — should not permit our suffering.

Thus, unable to escape pain, we accept that art be entrusted with the work of transfiguring “the swindle of believing.”

That said, one day the unexpected happens: you stumble upon the artistic work that, for a full two years, two friends — Bergamo, photographer-cook-angry-observer, and Pizzigoni, architect-painter-set designer-photographer-designer — have been developing, mixing and merging their two talents. And there they are, immense, the canvases, telling what the two intend to shout at us: the indignation at the unbearable limit reached by our lives. More than that, they deliver these canvases to us as an unresigned representation of a human race crushed by the small and great battles that daily si si  war front: a trench si si s by cults-tribes-races-parties-mortgages-vendettas-gossip, as if we did not have enough of the degeneration of the flesh and the pain of living, “democratically scattered from the sky.”

In words, Santi is inexplicable — I’ll say it immediately. Because you can dangerously slide toward Thomas Mann’s assertion, which saw art si s a force but as mere consolation; and since I cannot tolerate this risk and greatly fear the thunderbolts of that gigantic Zeus who first filled my eyes upon encountering the works of Bergamo & Pizzigoni, I will si s once that never more than in this case must the works be seen.

So I simply thought that the strange circumstance that had kept them within the limited confines of their studio rooms, speaking to very few about their adventure, almost jealous of others’ gaze, had to end. We need these Saints… and here it comes, on 11.11.11, their first exhibition together.

If we wish to speak of these Saints, it is wise to distance ourselves from the sacred as symbol and from sacredness as gesture: from the obligatory vision that religious iconography always carries with it like a ritual paste of stories, kabbalah, mythology, alchemy.

Indeed, the beauty of it is that our artists want nothing to do with it: sacred does not mean painting Christs and Madonnas…

On the contrary, their art is of an absolute modernity precisely because it is immensely distant from what tradition and current times impose upon us when we think of the iconography of the sacred. Bergamo & Pizzigoni have worked in the space that opens up within the very contradictions of the images that reach us. These, painfully expressed through words, through false oaths: the abyssal distance between the just and the unjust, between suffering and squandering, between endurance and dissipation, which they instead capture.

Bang…! Once this media-emotional ballast is erased or set aside, they focused on the disarming and anachronistic simplicity — and for this reason supremely powerful — of reconquering the fundamental trait of artistic work: as Fumaroli says, “the manual aspect of the creative process,” the direct and physical relationship of creation, today replaced by technological, serial, industrial production, which ends up equating the work of art with the fetish, the commodity, the advertising product.

Bergamo & Pizzigoni have perhaps not fully realized how revolutionary their paintings are today, paintings that make respect for the toil of living a narrated imperative: one is hypnotized by the photographic shot masterfully interpreted with chromatic power by the painterly mark. A true lay pictorial catechesis of man, which they, with a violent interpretive simplicity, tell us thus: the Saints today are us…

Dona Nobis Pacem, Grant Us Peace: from the Requiem, known as a Catholic rite and lent also to other religious ceremonies, Bergamo & Pizzigoni choose certain texts that circumnavigate their works, si s commentary upon them, but to vivify the contradiction between the fixity of an immutable liturgy and the freedom sought by the figures on the canvases.

Sacred and profane thus mingle and fade into new meanings, beyond the interpretations of Mozart or Handel, to take shape in the attempt to entrust the scream of the world to the people who inhabit it.

They seek only in those captions-lullabies (jubilando venite pargoli… ad portam venite populi…) a relationship with the past, certain that Balthasar cannot perform magic or teach tricks that might help find peace: the most important of all invocations!

“…In the labored hagiography of daily life, we are all Saints, called, in tormented and tormenting times, to take on the burden of our existences…” Thus write Fabrizio & Davide to describe their ethical ISKRA, and those people inside the paintings, real and present, are called Guido, Mariagrazia, Emanuele, Ayako, Claudio, Walter.

In the works they appear as numbers, because the name matters less than the universality of the curse of pain they express, struck down by Bergamo’s lens as if by the ashes of Pompeii.

These Saints, capable of transfiguring in their faces the “normal” sufferings of all of us, do not abandon themselves to futile redemptive promises. Mute, brushing against impotence, they give voice to the black hole of rage mixed with pain. And so here is the hand of Pizzigoni, who entrusts to metallic colors like steel, to fusions of copper, gold, and bronze, the tale of the strength and torment of daily living; here is the use of narrative devices like barbed wire or arrow-wings, not for intellectual quotationism but to give body to the contemporary epic of suffering.

“…The nails, the arrows, the incandescent wax, the torture crosses are the same timeless signs that religions have seized upon to authorize swift entry to paradise. Because transfiguration annuls limits, personal boundaries, the narrow confines of small lives, and projects toward great dimensions…”

And the gazes? Looking into the eyes of these human-saints, you understand why the works of Bergamo & Pizzigoni have these giant dimensions: they serve to hypnotize us, the viewers. A game that seems to me perfectly achieved: the few people who have had access to the canvases do not give opinions… they express sensations. One above all: I truly did not expect this!

Everything, then, here becomes powerfully human, at last!

And to finish, as if a piece were still missing from the path they had in mind, here is a sort of coup de théâtre, something intensely extraordinary: they invent a chapter of the exhibition, the second, called Waxes.

Here the scale is more intimate, a simple square meter of a familiar face with known features, resembling… and the album of cerebral pixels sets in motion and carries us all the way to a Pirandello of One, No One and One Hundred Thousand… better to say it plainly: it belongs to a clergyman accustomed to charity, here interpreted seven times through rust, nails, drawings, and colors aided by wax that becomes a living expressive medium, charged with its previous life.

The adventurous si si s interesting and unique — a mystical materialism — that leads the artists to choose wax in this stretch of their work, if possible even more human.

A gesture that, by inserting itself into the symbolic tradition traced over centuries by millions of the faithful of Holy Mother Church, desacralizes it, to unmask its inevitable mercantile reduction — easy promises from a huckster.

But this is not what the two artists are looking at. Wax is, for them, the choice of a natural and millennial material, risen to a symbol of passion in many religions — votive and confiding because it gathers expectations of liberation from pain, of submission to the unknown, but above all of hope: where the wax is consumed, man looks upward, and in that small flame rediscovers the primordial spark, the fire of life. Therefore nothing sacred, but living matter for a story, be it a rain of fire or a mouth sewn shut and deprived of speech.

There is a sort of modern, ethical mysticism in these works, a lay sensibility that approaches the sacred without submitting to it: knowing that the wax composing them comes from the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, the symbolic place of the Christian religion, the place where millions of faithful over the centuries have deposited their prayers, their hopes, their desires, through the votive and symbolic gesture of a candle that is lit and consumed — just as our destinies — cannot but gift these works a profound meaning.

The gesture of Bergamo & Pizzigoni in gathering the living fruit of those thousands of consumed candles, with all the life they contain, gives back to art what marketing attempts to steal from it.

It leaves the gesture for the gesture’s sake and calls upon humanity to reflect — the real kind, the kind that we are.

This is why I felt, beyond the bonds of friendship and affection, this choral work raise its voice from a prison apse and demand to be known, frequented, kept at home, in newspapers, in museums, in boardrooms, in soldiers’ tents, in the headquarters of drugs, politics, the mafia, culture, labor… and not used by circles of snobby fops.

This is why Bergamo & Pizzigoni matter: they tell us that all that living of difficulty, of insult, power and abuse, degradation and illness that represents the daily life of all of si s like an atomic pile that will give energy to our battle for survival. One senses, alongside the saints, powerful puppet masters too — that beside resignation, the strength of Spartacus always walks.

The saints today are us.