Critique edited by Michela Becchis”Sognodoppiosogno” TREBISONDA ARTE CONTEMPORANIA, Perugia

omnis mundi creatura / quasi liber et pictura / nobis est in speculum

Alano di Lilla

Two artists write. No, on the contrary, two artists write about eachother. The sense is gathered around the reflective. Because they write about another, but in a certain sense they write about themselves, describe themselves and narrate themselves, as their shared writing takes shape. Because, in fact, we are talking about bodies. Bodies that take shape through the infallibility of the word. Therefore a paradox, therefore, because there is nothing fallible about the word; fallible in the etymological sense of deceiving, inducing error. Or not. The word does not deceive, it is absolute, crystalline, pure. The opacity, the polysemicity, the dust that the writer applies and above all it resides in the pact that he -or they stipulate with the reader. Giulio De Martin and Nicola Rotiroti work exactly on these coordinates, on the body of the word, on the possibility of cloying that body of emotion, memory, impression, pain, joy, weight. To bear such a load, words must walk towards those who listen to them, read them and, above all, look at them. In Japanese the art of writing is called shodō, that is “way of writing” because what appears as the simple gesture of writing must be constructed as, on the one hand, a path towards the expression of moods, feelings, refinement of their sensitivity, and on the other towards a collaboration and the establishment of proper relationships. Here, this idea of writing as an itinerary, that is, a movement that has a purpose and that purpose is the Other and the search for a possible good relationship, fits very well with the project 1.1.3. Stella. We quote the shodō, because in the path that is inscribed in the ideograms that make up the word the commitment of the gesture is also contained shaping that path in an aesthetically perceptible way. In the construction of the De Martin and Rotiroti’s text the part of visibility is fundamental to the point of having to split the image they propose, to cut the space that welcomes it. The authors are committed to giving weight not to their writing, but to the story they tell, they separate the word from the story, to displace, almost to test those who must accept their seemingly aerial words, and transform them, reading them, into history, charge , heavy, that is, in the figurative. But it is not a stratagem, it is the search for a unity of narration. It is the long, thoughtful, meditated transformation of an intimate writing in a collective gesture. It is the invitation to inhabit all their writing and to change the story, as is natural when one enters a reality already mentioned, drawn, but not finished. How many gestures seem to ask the two authors of 1.1.3. Stella! Looking at writing, realizing that it has taken shape -or it has entered a body-, modifying it, reading it, grasping it, returning it. This great deal is reminiscent of Calvino: at the beginning of the novel if, on a winter’s night, a traveller, the narrator claims that he can read «sitting, lying down, curled up, lying down. Lying on their back, on their side, on their stomach […] also standing upside down, in a yoga position. With the book upside down, it is understood. Of course the ideal position to read cannot be found “. Reading is first of all physical, and a bodily activity is discussed in terms of muscular commitment, continuous involvement of the senses, let’s say it: fatigue. But because reading something means understanding something and reading is synonymous with awareness, knowledge, and the recognition of the signs through which the real-world addresses people. But in this case the “real world” is complicated by the fact that it is offered in second place, read, written and interpreted by two artists, by the Duo, who in the meantime have read each other. You would leave with the feeling of having gone into a maze, but my job is to hold you back, because instead you are faced with a beautiful act of freedom and attribution of a leading role to each of us who will stand before the lectern . While the sinuosity of the words they chose to narrate remains cloaked and silenced by them, De Martin and Rotiroti ask us to soften the buzz of the world to become a narrator of their world, to “give it a voice”, but ask that this gesture of trust is not casual, anywhere in space; the effort to read not the world, but a world, needs the visibility of the perspective from which it will be read so that it is a gesture of mutual and very human respect. «… The text you write must give me the proof you want me. This proof exists: it is writing. The writing is this: the science of the enjoyment of language, its kamasutra (and of this science there is only one treatise: writing itself) … »writes Roland Barthes in Pleasure of the text. Visible respect, mutual enjoyment: the two levels of a place, not so metaphorical, where 1.1.3. Stella arises.

Michela Becchis