IN THE ROOMS OF THE MEMORY

In the rooms of memory I've been lucky to find a precious booklet Rooms of memory: four poems by Gillo Dorfles and four engravings by Cosimo Budetta with a preface by Mario Lunetta. Siamè's last works came immediately to my mind. For two years I've been following his works "in the rooms of memory". In the booklet I've found a poem which impressed me, Three black manikins where is a fashinating description of three manikins without their heads: "No brain / no heart / no face / no sex / a symbolic breast only / unique and solid". That is the ending but I thought that maybe those manikins had a heart, at least to inspire these lines to the poet. Why do the rooms happen to be in the poem and in the painting? The room is the place where we stop, we isolate ourselves and where we rest. This use we make of this closed space which has nearly always a positive connotation. Do you remember the "small wooden room" in La casa di Mara by Aldo Palazzeschi? And do you remember how resounded "the quiet rooms" in Leopardi's Sylvia? Who has not dreaint with Il cielo in una stanza, Gino Paoli's song which is classic in the Italian modern music? Lets go back to Vincenzo Sciamè's rooms. Besides, wandering from pictorial to poetic or musical works (and veceversa) is not an alternative but parallel route. Sometimes the paintings do rouse the fantasy of the ones looking at them: the painted image is the means for a personal digression. Though you need the mind of an artist (De Chirico) to emphasize the poetry of a manikin, you don't need to be an artist or a poet to fell the "poetry" in the works of Vincenzo Sciamè. Sciamè's paintings arise as poetic works. If we look "into the room of memory", we are going to find sonnets, madrigals, songs and ballads. The rooms have a dominant red, the colour of the sun, blood, suffering, love that inspires this artist's universe. From "Pretence of red silence" o "the hours of desires" up to the last rooms of memory, that red colour racks and vivifies Sciamè's work, revealing its deep soul. In the rooms the walls and the floor are red so as to make a magic box where the event happens: a dead leaf, a butterfly, an egg, a wrope, a shell, a pearl, a ball...minimal signs that widen their semantic range reverberating in the red space. Sciamè writes in his sketches: "isolated among the crowd of my loneliness, I would like to paint infinite empty spaces. This shell, alone just like me, full of Aphrodite's perfume, brings me the far song of the mermaids in my Afican sea". And again: "A withered leaf, off the branch, goes on wandering in the wind...far from the other leaves and from its branch it feels free and lonely". The rigorous perspective of the floors refers to thar retreating line which marks the point of greatest concentration, the ultimate aim, of "the last room of the mortals" (Manzoni). In these rooms sometimes a wall grows lively, and opens to a scenary which belongs to the memory. The wall is the equivalent of Leopardi's hedge. Beyond this we imagine "endless distance", "superhuman silence", "deep stillness": a garden of palms, a hill iridescent to the moon, to the burning sunset, to the pink-fingered sunrise, to the daytime clouds, a place, Velletri, which speaks of itself. This is what Sciamè imagines, beyond the wall, on the memory of Sicilian summers, moments of nature deeply lived in himself, of daily experiences lived through the memory. There is no man, beyond the wall, maybe to show the impatience for a mean world. The artists feel depply and disclose the feelings of others. Sciamè feels the trouble of living in a universe which, in the Millenium, is impoverishing in values. At the sunset of utopia, the man survives, appealing to his life force, which for an artist, lies in his art. Art and/or faith are the only strenght that can nourish men. Art assumes crucial importance, like never before it assumes the role that Schopenhauer gave it: "...it pulls the object of its contemplation out of the stream of the world and holds it isolated in front of it: and that single object, which was in that stream the smallest part, represents the whole, equivalent of the infinite in space and time: art stops at this object" (Schopenhauer: The world as want and representation). So, let Sciamè lead us to find the idea. Then, walking in the polluted crowded streets, when we are about to tread on the last fallen leaf, let us remember of that painting of this artist with a leaf in the middle of the room, it will help us to see the world with compassionate eyes, with that charitas which is real love. Everyone of us, guided by the art, will change our room into a poetic "stanza", and the noises of the city around us will dissolve into music: "the birds painted among the leaves / calm down the air with new rhymes, / and among several voices an harmony holds so blissful notes and so sublime..." (Angelo Poliziano, Rooms for tournament, Book I, XC).

                                                                                                                        Stefania Severi