{"id":1133,"date":"2020-08-06T10:59:39","date_gmt":"2020-08-06T08:59:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.fabriziobergamo.it\/i-santi-hanno-detto\/"},"modified":"2026-03-03T20:20:35","modified_gmt":"2026-03-03T19:20:35","slug":"i-santi-about","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.fabriziobergamo.it\/en\/i-santi-about\/","title":{"rendered":"I Santi – about"},"content":{"rendered":"

I SANTI \/ ABOUT<\/p><\/h1><\/div>

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Santi, S\u00ec. By Marco Vallora
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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 \u2014 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 \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

Jean Clair, The Winter of Culture<\/em>. \u201cBaudelaire admitted that the cult of images had always been \u2018his great, unique, primitive passion.\u2019 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. (\u2026) Kirillov, in Dostoevsky\u2019s Demons<\/em>, will say: \u2018I am God, in spite of myself.\u2019 And Antonin Artaud, in 1947: \u2018I 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.\u2019 But Baudelaire remains a man of compassion, to whom the Superman is foreign (\u2026) he also says, regarding art, that it is full of \u2018ardent sobs\u2019 and that he cannot conceive of \u2018a type of Beauty in which there is no Unhappiness.\u2019 All things that today have become almost incomprehensible to us.\u201d<\/p>\n

Let us say it, then, confidentially, and a little ashamed: if today we casually toss out, in our conversation, the word \u201csaints\u201d \u2014 \u201cthe saints,\u201d \u201cat the saints,\u201d \u201cfor the saints\u201d \u2014 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 \u2014 in short, the caf\u00e9 chitchat: \u201cAnd what are you doing for All Saints\u2019?\u201d \u201cNo, I\u2019m leaving for All Souls\u2019.\u201d \u201cMuch better to do a ski week at All Saints\u2019, don\u2019t you think, rather than Christmas \u2014 fewer people\u2026\u201d 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 \u2014 vilified, moreover, by the very coercive mechanisms of the Church itself). Among other things, if saints are still spoken of today \u2014 and they are spoken of a great deal, drowsily, and at the most accelerated pace \u2014 they are almost always ultimate saints, fast, \u201csubito,\u201d not stratified through time, exhumed from immemorial beds of torture and martyrdom, copes and cilices, scraped clean of centuries of oblivion \u2014 si s all: visible and plasticized saints, almost media-ready, like the Good Pope, radiophonic and democratic, \u201cgive your children a caress,\u201d or the lightning-fast Pope Luciani, dead of suspicions, while he dutifully wrote to \u201cDearest Pinocchio,\u201d 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 \u201cnomination\u201d \u2014 innocenting as an ecumenical correction fluid \u2014 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\u2019s 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 \u2014 never mind martyrdom!).<\/p>\n

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) \u2014 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 \u2014 in the double sense of the term: photographic objective and expressive objective).<\/p>\n

Yes, of course, we are by now almost inured to suffering from common pains, from friendly unpredictable deaths or from family upheavals without warning \u2014 but si si isn\u2019t true, because one never becomes inured, and in the convulsive noise of a world that does not wish to hear the \u201cdisturbance\u201d 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 \u2014 an art that does not wish to be mercantile, or cunning, or merely glamorous \u2014 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. \u201cFrom there, in effect, the idea of the Saints was refined \u2014 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.\u201d 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 \u2014 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. \u201cWe 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\u201d). \u201cPerhaps 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 \u2014 battered but not defeated, we might say \u2014 this is extremely important and perhaps will have to surface sooner or later. And we must always remember Brecht\u2019s phrase: \u2018Blessed is the country that has no need of heroes\u2019?\u201d 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. \u201csi 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.\u201d \u201cWe\u2019re not exactly Jesus,\u201d they repeat insistently \u2014 perhaps to signify that they do not arrogate the right to give grades (if anything, they give \u201cfaces\u201d), to draw up licenses or class registers, to absolve or reward, to glorify the chosen. \u201cFor heaven\u2019s sake, we are the last to want to hand out marks for good conduct, report cards \u2014 that would be ridiculous. There is nothing moral or moralistic in this research of ours; if anything, quite the opposite.\u201d But their Saints, perhaps, are precisely those furthest from the classical concept of sanctity, of martyrdom, redolent of public admonition and merit. \u201cThey are Saints,\u201d Pizzigoni explains, \u201cwho 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.\u201d \u201cIt is obvious that for us whoever wants to appear at all costs, or even a little, cannot be a saint \u2014 certainly not \u2014 and if they are someone who suffers, they suffer without seeming to, without seeking a medal,\u201d probably also without the need for mirrors to admire their own \u201cheroism.\u201d \u201cIt is the dignity in suffering or in patience that matters to us, not suffering for its own sake \u2014 let that be clear.\u201d 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. \u201cIt 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 \u2014 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.\u201d 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 \u2014 one of the most ill-fated terms of our post-contemporaneity. \u201cYes, 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\u201d \u2014 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 \u201csticking\u201d her big face on si s a potential, promising diva \u2014 \u201cdrink more milk\u201d). 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 \u2014 a shapeless pulp of dissatisfaction and resignation, packages, bags, and leafed-through pages of discarded newspapers\u2026 even though you know perfectly well that if you isolated one face, or another, \u201cbehind\u201d and before, in a Zavattinian way, there would be millions of stories to tell and to highlight. There is a masterful story by Cort\u00e1zar, 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 \u2014 a brief stop and a possible love story or friendship that fades, in the opposite direction, infinitely. Davide: \u201cIn 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 \u2014 it isn\u2019t true that they\u2019re 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.\u201d 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 \u201cdarkness\u201d 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 \u201cstolen\u201d photographic icon. Almost in unison: \u201cEven 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 \u2018encountered\u2019 in our work we certainly did not go looking for, we did not call them with newspaper ads \u2014 come to us, the saintliest \u2014 no, we crossed paths with them gradually, after this strong idea was born of photographing according to a certain idea\u201d \u2014 a category of the spirit, almost. A \u201cform\u201d of being-there, \u201cthrown\u201d 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 \u201cemployed\u201d 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 \u201cheroism,\u201d 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 \u201ctools of the trade\u201d 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\u2019s 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, T\u00e0pies and Malevich, to the magnetic and undone cages of Bacon\u2019s interiors, to the Colossus of Goya\u2019s Black Paintings \u2014 which they now tell si s no longer by Goya \u2014 or to the tubular auto-da-f\u00e9 hoods of the Dionysian festivals of Torquemada-ized Spain? \u201cI did not think of Malevich or of T\u00e0pies, but certainly in an artist\u2019s memory all of this is indelible patrimony, even if one then wishes to oppose or deny it \u2014 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 \u2018catalogued\u2019 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.\u201d And so, might we agree that the shielding \u201cFaraday cage\u201d functions as a frame-container, which restrains and buffers the screaming explosion of the flesh, perhaps \u201cfixing\u201d the figure in a sort of poncif cementation, like a holy card \u2014 as if it were a transparent reliquary case for an immolated relic? \u201cWhat in Bacon is a deformation of the body, here becomes for me a deformation of space\u2026\u201d \u2014 or better, a formation of space, indeed a delimitation of containment? \u201cYes, also because it is space that deforms, not through the corruption of the flesh, but of the environment. I must say that beyond Bacon\u2019s cages I also had in mind that painting by Magritte called \u2018Perspective: Madame R\u00e9camier,\u2019 where he redoes David\u2019s portrait of R\u00e9camier, only instead of the beautiful young woman he places a solid coffin, which has the shape of a human figure reclining \u2014 or rather, seated.\u201d Certainly, also playing with the double meaning of the Empire R\u00e9camier 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\u2019s Samson Agonistes, precipitated down into the abyss of Hell, since by now every Paradise is lost) \u2014 we could also link it to certain iconographies of liquid terribleness in painting, in the shipwreck, within the boiling pitch of the \u201cLast Judgment.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOurs does not wish to be a discourse either destructive \u2014 against certain realities of faith \u2014 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.\u201d Let us explain: not the traditional, confessional, churchly sacred, even if everywhere, like penitential arrows, the \u201cconfiteor\u201d 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 \u2014 \u201cBeatus vir,\u201d \u201cJubilando venite, pargoli\u201d \u2014 perhaps contouring the forms in an all-too-human human silhouette, and above all \u201cDona eius requiem\u201d \u2014 they are only peace but also the Requiem, because in fact the phrases are all drawn, significantly and without exception, from the \u201cRequiem Masses\u201d of Mozart, Verdi, Berlioz \u2014 including Brahms\u2019s \u201cGerman Requiem,\u201d with something still Protestant about it to which we shall have to return \u2014 and there is even a portrayed figure who is an Anglican authority. The \u201cMass of the Dead\u201d as the greatest common denominator, also of a shared, common language, even in the scant faith of observants. \u201cYes, the Latin of yesteryear, like the English of today, everyone had to know it and respond almost mechanically to these that you call \u2018sacred slogans.\u2019 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 \u2018biblical\u2019 passes for us through Mozart or Verdi. There is no God for these images of ours, nor would it make sense to evoke one\u2026\u201d And yet something terrible, supernal, from the Old Testament \u2014 something that smacks of an avenging God, to put it in the words of Verdi or Rossini \u2014 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. \u201cThe Sistine, perhaps yes, in certain respects. \u2018Maledictis iudicavit,\u2019 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.\u201d 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 \u2014 an Orson Welles-like procession of Mannerist fun-house mirrors, or of Cretan Madonna painters who drank from the stretched swamp of El Greco. \u201cCertainly, I don\u2019t 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 \u2014 it is from where you look, from where you position yourself, that the perspective takes on its unusual, creative dimension.\u201d \u201cYes, 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, \u00e0 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.\u201d Always underscoring this oppressive aspect, of fresco illusionism, of a threatening foreshortening from below, of a crumbling quadratura. Crushing of expression and muscular tension. \u201cBecause we certainly cannot escape this persecutory nightmare of the Catholic guilt complex, of atavistic suffering from which one cannot flee \u2014 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.\u201d 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 \u2014 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 \u00e0 la Prampolini. Fabrizio: \u201cYes, I had this idea of having wax sent to me from Jerusalem, directly from the Holy Sepulcher \u2014 and I asked the help of a friend who is in direct contact with those sacred places \u2014 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 \u2014 this \u2014 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 \u2014 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 \u2014 materic. Very mimetic of our idea of non-religion.\u201d 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 \u2014 indeed, the aphonia \u2014 of so many pierced and offended mouths? \u201cTheir mouths are pierced because today\u2019s saints are prevented from speaking. It isn\u2019t that they lack words to protest or shout, si s si s if no one wanted to listen to them.\u201d They are not, then, tuned to the Warholian five minutes of glory of the television \u201cappearance\u201d \u2014 \u201cto the empty sirens of video, certainly, no one listens to them or wants to hear them.\u201d 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. \u201cThe 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\u2026 but what a frightening and suffocating thing \u2014 and so once again you are compelled to confess and recount everything in your interiority and pass under these uncomfortable Caudine Forks anyway.\u201d 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. \u201cThey 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 \u2014 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 \u00a0all out, bring it back into the world. A vomit that simultaneously suffocates you and liberates you, choking you.\u201d 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. \u201cUltimately 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 \u2014 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

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? \u201cA good question. No, in fact. Better to sow doubts than to convey certain, univocal messages. The interpretation, in reality, we leave to the viewer \u2014 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.\u201d Saints, yes. Lay saints. But saints.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>

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The Saints Are Us. By Mario Giusti<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Dies irae, dies illa solvet saeclum in favilla<\/em><\/strong>
\n(Day of wrath, that day shall consume the world in fire, from the Requiem)<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 in the long run but at an immensely more accelerated pace than normal human evolution \u2014 is screwing up our brains.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cmodernity\u201d is of no use: then eyes, hands, or fists are raised to the universe, in impotence and rage, knowing that \u201c\u2026the mighty hand from heaven\u2026\u201d will not arrive.<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 divine existence and its manifestation \u2014 should not permit our suffering.<\/p>\n

Thus, unable to escape pain, we accept that art be entrusted with the work of transfiguring \u201cthe swindle of believing.\u201d<\/p>\n

That said, one day the unexpected happens: you stumble upon the artistic work that, for a full two years, two friends \u2014 Bergamo, photographer-cook-angry-observer, and Pizzigoni, architect-painter-set designer-photographer-designer \u2014 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 \u00a0war 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, \u201cdemocratically scattered from the sky.\u201d<\/p>\n

In words, Santi is inexplicable \u2014 I\u2019ll say it immediately. Because you can dangerously slide toward Thomas Mann\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019 gaze, had to end. We need these Saints\u2026 and here it comes, on 11.11.11, their first exhibition together.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Indeed, the beauty of it is that our artists want nothing to do with it: sacred does not mean painting Christs and Madonnas\u2026<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Bang\u2026! Once this media-emotional ballast is erased or set aside, they focused on the disarming and anachronistic simplicity \u2014 and for this reason supremely powerful \u2014 of reconquering the fundamental trait of artistic work: as Fumaroli says, \u201cthe manual aspect of the creative process,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2026<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

They seek only in those captions-lullabies (jubilando venite pargoli\u2026 ad portam venite populi\u2026<\/em>) 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!<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2026In the labored hagiography of daily life, we are all Saints, called, in tormented and tormenting times, to take on the burden of our existences\u2026\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s lens as if by the ashes of Pompeii.<\/p>\n

These Saints, capable of transfiguring in their faces the \u201cnormal\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2026The 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\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2026 they express sensations. One above all: I truly did not expect this!<\/p>\n

Everything, then, here becomes powerfully human, at last!<\/p>\n

And to finish, as if a piece were still missing from the path they had in mind, here is a sort of coup de th\u00e9\u00e2tre, something intensely extraordinary: they invent a chapter of the exhibition, the second, called Waxes.<\/p>\n

Here the scale is more intimate, a simple square meter of a familiar face with known features, resembling\u2026 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\u2026 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.<\/p>\n

The adventurous si si s interesting and unique \u2014 a mystical materialism \u2014 that leads the artists to choose wax in this stretch of their work, if possible even more human.<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 easy promises from a huckster.<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 just as our destinies \u2014 cannot but gift these works a profound meaning.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

It leaves the gesture for the gesture\u2019s sake and calls upon humanity to reflect \u2014 the real kind, the kind that we are.<\/p>\n

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\u2019 tents, in the headquarters of drugs, politics, the mafia, culture, labor\u2026 and not used by circles of snobby fops.<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 that beside resignation, the strength of Spartacus always walks.<\/p>\n

The saints today are us.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"100-width.php","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1133","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nI Santi - about - Fabrizio Bergamo<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.fabriziobergamo.it\/en\/i-santi-about\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"I Santi - about - Fabrizio Bergamo\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.fabriziobergamo.it\/en\/i-santi-about\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Fabrizio Bergamo\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2026-03-03T19:20:35+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"36 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.fabriziobergamo.it\\\/en\\\/i-santi-about\\\/\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.fabriziobergamo.it\\\/en\\\/i-santi-about\\\/\",\"name\":\"I Santi - 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