Thursday 21 December, 18pm, inauguration of the exhibition “From Earth to Heaven”
On the night of Saint Patrick, a green star-shaped sepal begins its journey from the hypogeum of Santa Maria delle Anime del Purgatorio to Arco, to shine in the sky of Concetta Modica.
Between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the dawn of the Modern Age, the era of great discoveries, of the New World, is signed by two characters who express with their thoughts and actions the yearning for conquest and knowledge of space.
The astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, who with his celestial discoveries annulled the Ptolemaic cosmology so close to the biblical theories on the order of the universe and the navigator par excellence, Christopher Columbus, another symbolic figure of the marvelous, of the challenge and of the journey itself, who together not only put an end to the disbelief in the sphericity of the Earth, but also to the impossibility of navigating the ocean.
Four hundred years later, Man, connecting the physical and the metaphysical, celebrates with the verse of the ode “To the new moon” by Salvatore Quasimodo the launch of Sputnik in 1957, which just like a star goes to sow other worlds – “without fear, in the clear sky of an October night, / placed other luminaries equal / to those that turned / from the creation of the world. Amen” – almost interpreting the synthesis of the project “From the earth to the sky”, which, from Thursday 21 December at 18 pm, will animate the Museum Complex of Santa Maria delle Anime del Purgatorio, with a rich and heterogeneous program, dominated by its key event, namely the installation of the work by Concetta Modica “The journey of a tomato sepal to become a star – portrait of a night, The night of Santa Patrizia”.
The inauguration of the exhibition will take place in the presence of the artist Concetta Modica, the curator of the Santa Maria delle Anime del Purgatorio ad Arco Museum Complex Francesca Amirante, the curator of the exhibition Susanna Ravelli, the art historian Marco Izzolino, the cultural designer Nicola Ciancio
Concetta Modica's work, a drape in neoprene, ropes, gold thread, bronze castings, stones, contains the idea of travel as an experience of knowledge, but also of migration. A sepal, the characteristic green star-shaped calyx that supports the tomato fruit, dreams of becoming a star and through an escape it succeeds, joining all the stars in the sky. A metaphor for the possibility of leaving one's own garden and one's own destiny, but also a journey as a moment of introspection, of searching for one's own aspirations, of conquering one's place in the world.
“This Neapolitan journey of a tomato sepal to become a star by Concetta Modica is dedicated to Saint Patricia. – explains the curator of the exhibition Susanna Ravelli – A sky dotted with bright tomato sepals that represent aspirations, desires, a universal tension of hope projected into a firmament that is also a tribute to the soul and feminine power of the city. Veiled Naples reveals, on the anniversary of its foundation, winter solstice of 475 BC, its enchantment of stars and ascended souls, in the abyss of the night that captures the gaze of poets, artists and that fascinated Nicolaus Copernicus becoming the subject of his scientific revolution”.
Concetta Modica's studies began in 2018, giving life to works that have taken different forms: video, animation, watercolor or fresco illustration on terracotta surfaces, using sepals that become golden stars.
Only later do the starry skies with golden sepals become the representation of a specific night, the one that accompanied a small event that changed history.
A sky is the portrait of a Parisian night on February 18, 1955, when Coco Chanel presented a shoulder bag for the first time, freeing women's hands.
Another sky full of golden sepals is from October 30, 1974 when Muhammad Ali beat George Foreman in a boxing match in Kinshasa.
There is the night when the remains of Saint Lucia found a place in the church of San Geremia in Venice and so on and so forth.
During the trip to Naples in the itinerant residence Grand Tour en Italie | Napoli velata svelata, in collaboration with Ex Voto and Superotium, visiting the Purgatory Complex in Arco, the artist grasps the idea of a new “heaven”, having perceived a strong connection between the pezzentelle souls, whose ancient cult is kept within the walls of the fascinating seventeenth-century jewel, with the tomato sepals that want to become stars.
“The hypogeum of the Museum Complex of Santa Maria delle Anime del Purgatorio hosts the cult of anonymous human remains. They are souls traveling from purgatory to paradise. – says Concetta Modica – Our tomato sepal is also on a journey, it goes upwards because it wants to become a star. The lower church is a cemetery, a part is used as the Holy Land, there is earth and darkness, a sky is missing. So in the slide where the bodies were lowered there will be a sky that the souls can look at and our sepal will be able to continue its journey”.
Even the poor souls, souls of Purgatory trapped in a state of transition, look with hope and desire to the sky where they see Paradise, their final destination. For them too it is important to look beyond the limitations of their condition, facing a path of suffering that will lead them to reach Paradise. In the large lower church of Purgatory in Arco, where everything is dark and earth, the artist imagined a sky, a great absentee to which all the souls of the cemetery aspire. There, a sky will be represented that can be seen in the dark, in the slide where the coffins were lowered. It will be the sky of a night that will be represented, that of August 25, 1625, the date of the sanctification of Saint Patricia, which is also the day of the year in which blood melts. In the work, the position of the stars on the night of Saint Patricia will be reproduced on the sky-colored cloth, embroidered with gold thread with the insertion of bronze and ceramic castings of tomato sepals.
In the writings of Gesualdo Bufalino, in the wake of the Sicilian tradition that goes from Verga to Tomasi di Lampedusa, the contemplation of death is always present: we use the words of the writer from Comiso to describe this conflict: “Where mourning is darkest, there the light is most flagrant” (from “Diceria dell'untore”). This will be the case metaphysically and really also in the Hypogeum of Santa Maria delle Anime del Purgatorio in Arco, with the work of Modica, where the disappearance emanates towards us the flower of a bitter, but new spring, of an era to explore, in which to carve out a new land of friendship and conversation. It also urges us to intertwine, without stopping, visible and invisible, to build a vehicle, I don't know, magical contact that can be that work of art, those rays of sun that slip into the church, a color. The viaticum of the “dream” starts from the darkness, from the shadow as in Plato's cave, while holding on to the pole of great realism, in a reciprocal relationship between paradox and everyday life that appears to be based on an ambivalence in which opposites are dialectically linked and the boundaries between illusion and reality are constantly violated, but only to be restored in an incessant movement of opposition and fusion.
Concetta Modica with her starry sky invites us to abandon every attempt at control and to try to discover the means that allow us to be ourselves. And in saying things, in saying the silence present in them, the word in its questioning must rekindle wonder. Wonder that is not only enchantment or ecstatic overcoming of reason, but is, and continues to be, reflection: the reflection of the cogito that experiences both the anguish of silence – that is, of death – and the joy of the word, of the light of things. How can we save ourselves from the erosion of time and indifference? The philosopher Aldo Masullo shows us the way: by humanizing occasional emotions, be they the encounter with the pure gaze of an animal, the sublime of nature, a starry sky, a reading, participation in an artistic event. In fact, there is no “phenomenon”, or “experience”, emotional or otherwise, that is not such because it is felt as “mine”, proper to a self. By moving emotions and finding ourselves in them, the erosion of time will disappear, relationships will be possible again, thanks to difference and dialogue, which will resolve in speeches of Love, the only valid viaticum for the future of Humanity.
“In Concetta Modica's installation there is the earth and the sky, there is a simple and corruptible tomato sepal that becomes a star: there are therefore all the elements that are part of the universe of the poor souls, who hope in their humanity to ascend from the earth to the sky thanks to the prayers, the intermediations, the care of the living. – says Francesca Amirante, curator of the Santa Maria delle Anime del Purgatorio museum complex in Arco – They look up, always up, the souls of Purgatory but in the magnificent hypogeum of the church of Purgatory in Arco they do not see the sky and so the work of Concetta Modica becomes another act of care: a small piece of the universe insinuates itself into the depths of the earth and brings to all those who rest a glimpse of the sky, dotted with stars. The sepal has become light”.
Concetta Modica's work is the first of six works to be unveiled by the artists of the traveling residency Grand Tour en Italie, conceived by Michela Eremita and Susanna Ravelli, which was held in Naples between 2022 and 2023 with the presence of Maura Banfo, Simona Da Pozzo, Stefania Mazzola, Tiziana and Isabella Pers. The work exhibited in the Complesso del Purgatorio ad Arco is a manifesto of collaboration, one ascends not alone, but with a mutualistic help of souls and aspirations, a shared dimension, also confirmed in the artistic practice and in the contribution of local people and organizations: Maria Corbi, Nicola Ciancio and Marco Izzolino.
Article published on 18 December 2023 - 18:35
