Museo ItaloAmericano and the Istituto Italiano di Cultura in San Francisco present “Immaginario Barocco”, photographs by Giuseppe Leone
An extraordinary photographic journey of Sicily’s Val di Noto is captured by Giuseppe Leone in a photographic exhibit presented by the Istituto Italiano di Cultura in San Francisco. The “Immaginario Barocco” exhibit will remain open until May 25, 2008. Art critic Silvano Nigro writes: “Leone is nourished by Sicilian Baroque... The theme of architecture and of life are the settings of Leone’s art.
His camera enters in the residence of the aristocracy, in the salons of the bourgeoisie and in the churches.” Maria Gloria writes: “The Sicilian Baroque inspired photographs are fantastic and fun. The exhibit will be at the Museo Italo-Americano until May 25, 2008. Don’t miss it.” The museo is at Fort Mason, Building C in San Francisco. Museo hours are: Noon to 4:00 p.m., Tuesday-Sunday.
Giuseppe Leone thus speaks about his works. “On January 11, 1693 the strongest of the earthquakes of a geotectonic nature affected the whole of eastern Sicily, the Val di Noto and part of Val Demone, two of the three areas into which the island had been divided since the time of the Arabs. It destroyed 60 towns, demolished more than 7,000 churches, 250 convents, 22 collegiate churches and two cathedrals; the victims counted were 60,000.
A catastrophic earthquake of such proportions represented the end of the world for those who suffered it; it was as if the very existence of life had ended. But in the case of the 1693 earthquake something extraordinary happened: in a collective rush the rebuilding was immediate, determining the places and modes of building, producing an artistic renewal and an urbanization that centuries later appears to our eyes like an original chapter of history, urbanistic, architectural and social to be admired today in the Val di Noto.
The latter, from the ruins of the huge cataclysm, revived in a proscenium of villages and towns perching on hills or lying in lowlands that as in a mirage appear in a nonpareil theatricality. Today Noto, Ragusa, Modica, Scicli, Militello Val di Catania, Palazzolo Acreide, Catania and Siracusa have been made World Heritage by UNESCO.
Mine is a story in pictures, which I have been continuing for twenty years on this late Baroque culture and on the influence that this had in daily life and in society, in feasts and urban spaces among ephemeral craftsmanship and in all life, a story serving to reveal a moment among the happiest in this part of the world.” S
ALVATORE SILVANO NIGRO, professor and art critic, writes: “Giuseppe Leone has been nurtured on Sicilian baroque. The lens of his camera is a "distortion of perspective" inside which "there are frenzy angles, breaks and twisting of lines", and "bases, capitals and columns, with fables of plasters, shreds and disproportion" break down. The laughs of mouth, the catlike masks, the grotesque bust portraits, the immodesties of breasts and sides that in livid stone, support the baroque balconies are "nonsense".
Just as the acrobatic putti, in gypsum or in marble, are "nonsense". It is all "foliage", an ornament, juggling, stone turning into a satyr: growing insolent or winking in a hallucinatory way. Leone's unbridled wit did not detach from the whirl of the facades, from the columns, from the altars, that torpid, outlandish, playful, grinning and allusive "theatre". It did not detach it and drop it down into the streets and the piazzas. The theater of architecture and the theater of life are the great theater of Leone's art.
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