The creative team, by Peter Russel
I believe that to be really alive one needs to be in a state of active inspiration.
A blessed state, certainly, and not an every day occurrence. Unfortunately, in these first few months of the third millennium, old twentieth century notions continue to reduce our lives to a uniform level of unawareness - to earn, consume, enjoy oneself or, as I have been, for years, in the habit of saying rather bitterly: birth, television, death - a bad copy of a famous comment by Thomas Stearns Eliot.
In the City of Art, Campobello di Licata, inspiration not only exists, it is a communal undertaking.
This admirable activity, in force now for over 20 years, rotates around two equally-positive poles: on the one hand a many-faceted artist and visionary, on the other a Mayor, aided by his dynamic and long-serving administration, who knows how to adorn and immortalise the town, not only through practical and economic instruments and resources, but also, and above-all, through beautiful, spirtual and lasting works like those by Master Silvio Benedetto.
The poetess Maria Stella Filippini is part of this enterprise.
“Ut pictura poiesis” said Horace, echoing Simonide, if I remember rightly: Dante painted words on parchment as though they were sculpted in stone - reminding one of the tablets on which God sculpted the Ten Commandments (broken by Moses, enraged by the obstinacy of his people), or the twelve ancient Roman tablets.
Silvio Benedetto has painted on stone not only the words of Dante but also his emotions and the supposed emotions of contemporary people who read Dante’s words in the light of seven centuries of history and culture.
Now, to complete the circle, the poetess once again depicts Benedetti’s paintings in words, in a utopian and apocalyptic key which rejects the traditional concept of condemnation and punishment for sins, fully in line with the Maestro who maintains that he represents “emotions in the absence of moral judgement”.
A declaration by the Aurus press office in Rome on 3 July, 1999, summarises very succinctly the artistic and philosophical principles underlying the entire work: “The project, faithful to the intentions of the Maestro who conceived it, does not propose to present an illustrated journey through Dante’s Commedia, but rather to transform the visitor into a sort of “active user” who retraces the experience “lived” by Dante, sharing his emotions and anxieties.
Among the artist’s principal merits - apart from his technical skill and the multiplicity of formal solutions adopted- his ability to bring Dante’s masterpiece up to date through references that lead on to contemporary history, makes the entire cycle a sort of pictorial update, a visul appendix to the divine Poet’s text.
Examples of “contemporary contaminations” inserted by Benedetto with subtle, almost elegant discretion, without ever contradicting or weakening the complex architectural structure of the Commedia, neither disturb nor undermine the cohesion of his narrative syntax built on the Dantean model.
Painter and sculptor, playwright, novelist and poet, theatre director and actor, art critic and theorist, skilled sketcher and portrait artist, expert scholar of philosophy, religion, sociology, world history and literature, as well as committed but certainly not party-dominated politician, academic; at the same time expert artisan and creative artist of the sacred and the profane; not least factotum or good man from every point of view, but rather Maestro of all, Silvio Benedetto was born in Argentina, in 1938 and emerged very early with his sacred art in Buenos Aires and Mexico.
He has been in Italy since 1960; he has exhibited his works in almost every European country and in the most important Italian cities but above-all the largest consistent and homogeneous collection of his greatest and most significative works is to be found in Campobello di Licata.
His most committed work is “The Valley of Painted Stones”, a sort of open-air museum with his pieces of Alcamo travertine, each over two metres in height, presenting a twentieth-century view of the Commedia.
A blessed state, certainly, and not an every day occurrence. Unfortunately, in these first few months of the third millennium, old twentieth century notions continue to reduce our lives to a uniform level of unawareness - to earn, consume, enjoy oneself or, as I have been, for years, in the habit of saying rather bitterly: birth, television, death - a bad copy of a famous comment by Thomas Stearns Eliot.
In the City of Art, Campobello di Licata, inspiration not only exists, it is a communal undertaking.
This admirable activity, in force now for over 20 years, rotates around two equally-positive poles: on the one hand a many-faceted artist and visionary, on the other a Mayor, aided by his dynamic and long-serving administration, who knows how to adorn and immortalise the town, not only through practical and economic instruments and resources, but also, and above-all, through beautiful, spirtual and lasting works like those by Master Silvio Benedetto.
The poetess Maria Stella Filippini is part of this enterprise.
“Ut pictura poiesis” said Horace, echoing Simonide, if I remember rightly: Dante painted words on parchment as though they were sculpted in stone - reminding one of the tablets on which God sculpted the Ten Commandments (broken by Moses, enraged by the obstinacy of his people), or the twelve ancient Roman tablets.
Silvio Benedetto has painted on stone not only the words of Dante but also his emotions and the supposed emotions of contemporary people who read Dante’s words in the light of seven centuries of history and culture.
Now, to complete the circle, the poetess once again depicts Benedetti’s paintings in words, in a utopian and apocalyptic key which rejects the traditional concept of condemnation and punishment for sins, fully in line with the Maestro who maintains that he represents “emotions in the absence of moral judgement”.
A declaration by the Aurus press office in Rome on 3 July, 1999, summarises very succinctly the artistic and philosophical principles underlying the entire work: “The project, faithful to the intentions of the Maestro who conceived it, does not propose to present an illustrated journey through Dante’s Commedia, but rather to transform the visitor into a sort of “active user” who retraces the experience “lived” by Dante, sharing his emotions and anxieties.
Among the artist’s principal merits - apart from his technical skill and the multiplicity of formal solutions adopted- his ability to bring Dante’s masterpiece up to date through references that lead on to contemporary history, makes the entire cycle a sort of pictorial update, a visul appendix to the divine Poet’s text.
Examples of “contemporary contaminations” inserted by Benedetto with subtle, almost elegant discretion, without ever contradicting or weakening the complex architectural structure of the Commedia, neither disturb nor undermine the cohesion of his narrative syntax built on the Dantean model.
Painter and sculptor, playwright, novelist and poet, theatre director and actor, art critic and theorist, skilled sketcher and portrait artist, expert scholar of philosophy, religion, sociology, world history and literature, as well as committed but certainly not party-dominated politician, academic; at the same time expert artisan and creative artist of the sacred and the profane; not least factotum or good man from every point of view, but rather Maestro of all, Silvio Benedetto was born in Argentina, in 1938 and emerged very early with his sacred art in Buenos Aires and Mexico.
He has been in Italy since 1960; he has exhibited his works in almost every European country and in the most important Italian cities but above-all the largest consistent and homogeneous collection of his greatest and most significative works is to be found in Campobello di Licata.
His most committed work is “The Valley of Painted Stones”, a sort of open-air museum with his pieces of Alcamo travertine, each over two metres in height, presenting a twentieth-century view of the Commedia.
The fact that he presents elements close to the recent avant-garde - for example, the inclusion of astronauts with Beatrice and at least the intention of depicting Pluto, Dis, like Disney’s Pluto - will certainly disturb the more purist spectators, but such contaminations are very few in number and are perhaps justifiable when it is considered that the artist has included non only conventional Dantean iconography, but also strong influences or echoes of Mantegna, Paolo Uccello, Goya and Ensor, as well as photographic reproductions.
It cannot be denied that the whole work is highly spectacular, but at the same time it is completely devoid of vulgarizing commercial spectacularity, Hollywood- style pseudo art and “pop”. Indeed, it seems to me that both the extremely varied scenografhy and the implicit moral principles presented underline the pressing problems to be found in the crisis of modern-day politics and the Christian faith.
At this point, one could ask how many of the urgencies felt by Dante at the beginning of the fourteenth century have any relevance in the world of today.
At the cost of creating a scandal, I would say they all do. Those urgencies remain valid as a postulate of lived faith and in the interiore homine, beyond the scenographic apparatus that all religions adopt in the making of provisional choices and in the ritual functions of exterior conduct.
For this reason, in my opinion, a return to Dante is required not through the rereading in aesthetic vein of the Divina Commedia, but rather through a rigorous re-examination of the ethical, political and religious motivations that unsettle the wounded soul of an authentic Christian who, in the face off official exhibitionary clamour, intended for everyone, not only for himself - counters with an interior pilgrimage, carried out in the light of reason and pure faith, by crossing the kingdoms of damnation and expiation in order to be reunited with God, thanks to the discovery of that “straight way” from which he had strayed following the “moral and intellectual perversion” that had afflicted him in the middle of his life’s journey.
Benedetti’s work has been fortunate in finding a communicator and interpreter like Maria Stella Filippini Di Caro.
The poetess, who lives and works in Ravanusa, in the province of Agrigento, has published two collections of poems: “Così che io possa” (1995, Libro italiano, Ragusa) and “Simun il vento” (1998, Centro Studi Giulio Pastore, Agrigento).
Of the second collection, the critic Licia Cardillo says: Rainer Maria Rilke wrote: “Nature is not capable of reaching us, we need the strength to interpret it and engage it, to translate it into some form of human dimension, in order to benefit from its minimun part”.
It is this capacity to interpret nature, engage it, translate it into human form and make it readable that we find in the collection of poems Simun, il vento by Maria Stella Filippini Di Caro. The lyrics impress on the soul an extraordinary acceleration and direct it along ways that have been lost in time, in the shadowy areas hiding beyond consciousness, in limitless spaces.
The vehicle for this journey towards the Absolute is an extremely refined, ductile, rarefied language which is capable of saying the unsayable, of grasping the relationship between things, the analogies, the pulsations of Nature, the whispering voice of the Universe.
Filippini’s poetry is prismatic: airy, interweaved with dreams and mystery, or as fiery as the Simùn, the wind of the desert (Sambuca di Sicilia, Agrigento, January 1998).
This judgement, together with the essay by Dino Ales, give us a clear idea of the poetic works produced by our poetess.
I recognise a strong free verse line, with powerful images and arousing, original metaphors, fully suited to representing the Maestro’s paintings.
The emphasis falls on the suffering of the perpetrators of sin, in particular sins against humanity in the social and political sense, and on the consequent suffering, then on the Angels’s voice, the call to order and eventual universal pardon.
This utopic and apocalyptic solution or resolution represents, or is witness to, the Maestro’s humanism and the profound humanity of the poetess.
It cannot be denied that the whole work is highly spectacular, but at the same time it is completely devoid of vulgarizing commercial spectacularity, Hollywood- style pseudo art and “pop”. Indeed, it seems to me that both the extremely varied scenografhy and the implicit moral principles presented underline the pressing problems to be found in the crisis of modern-day politics and the Christian faith.
At this point, one could ask how many of the urgencies felt by Dante at the beginning of the fourteenth century have any relevance in the world of today.
At the cost of creating a scandal, I would say they all do. Those urgencies remain valid as a postulate of lived faith and in the interiore homine, beyond the scenographic apparatus that all religions adopt in the making of provisional choices and in the ritual functions of exterior conduct.
For this reason, in my opinion, a return to Dante is required not through the rereading in aesthetic vein of the Divina Commedia, but rather through a rigorous re-examination of the ethical, political and religious motivations that unsettle the wounded soul of an authentic Christian who, in the face off official exhibitionary clamour, intended for everyone, not only for himself - counters with an interior pilgrimage, carried out in the light of reason and pure faith, by crossing the kingdoms of damnation and expiation in order to be reunited with God, thanks to the discovery of that “straight way” from which he had strayed following the “moral and intellectual perversion” that had afflicted him in the middle of his life’s journey.
Benedetti’s work has been fortunate in finding a communicator and interpreter like Maria Stella Filippini Di Caro.
The poetess, who lives and works in Ravanusa, in the province of Agrigento, has published two collections of poems: “Così che io possa” (1995, Libro italiano, Ragusa) and “Simun il vento” (1998, Centro Studi Giulio Pastore, Agrigento).
Of the second collection, the critic Licia Cardillo says: Rainer Maria Rilke wrote: “Nature is not capable of reaching us, we need the strength to interpret it and engage it, to translate it into some form of human dimension, in order to benefit from its minimun part”.
It is this capacity to interpret nature, engage it, translate it into human form and make it readable that we find in the collection of poems Simun, il vento by Maria Stella Filippini Di Caro. The lyrics impress on the soul an extraordinary acceleration and direct it along ways that have been lost in time, in the shadowy areas hiding beyond consciousness, in limitless spaces.
The vehicle for this journey towards the Absolute is an extremely refined, ductile, rarefied language which is capable of saying the unsayable, of grasping the relationship between things, the analogies, the pulsations of Nature, the whispering voice of the Universe.
Filippini’s poetry is prismatic: airy, interweaved with dreams and mystery, or as fiery as the Simùn, the wind of the desert (Sambuca di Sicilia, Agrigento, January 1998).
This judgement, together with the essay by Dino Ales, give us a clear idea of the poetic works produced by our poetess.
I recognise a strong free verse line, with powerful images and arousing, original metaphors, fully suited to representing the Maestro’s paintings.
The emphasis falls on the suffering of the perpetrators of sin, in particular sins against humanity in the social and political sense, and on the consequent suffering, then on the Angels’s voice, the call to order and eventual universal pardon.
This utopic and apocalyptic solution or resolution represents, or is witness to, the Maestro’s humanism and the profound humanity of the poetess.
