Witnesses
Philippe Daverio (art critic, journalist, tv conductor, lecturer)
"Fronteversismo"
“I have never attended painting lessons, nor did I have "masters", except the ones back in school and obviously the great artists which I had the pleasure to meet: the sculptors Kengiro Azuma and Giorgio Berlini and the painter Fernando Leal Audirac.”
With these words Giuseppe Siniscalchi describes his artistic education. Although paradoxical if compared to his success as attorney, his autobiography of words and pictures shows that he is a man always looking for his own "profession". Or rather we should say that Siniscalchi lives in that tension between two callings, the professional and the artistic, which characterized the course of many great human lifes: from Rousseau "le Douanier" (the customs officer) to Winston Churchill (just to show the variety of possible combinations). However Rousseau had no vocation for being a customs officer, while Sir Winston had an inclination for both politics and open air landscape painting: very British indeed.
On the other side, Siniscalchi is an example of self-taught technique that finds in spirituality and philosophy the reflexive roots where pictorial invention can arise. His grounding into the Japanese cultural tradition is exactly what many artists (in words and pictures) made in the XXth century.
Why? First of all his own biography (his family's composition) explains those links, but secondly it is also because he is fascinated by the definiteness and suggestion of Japanese calligraphy (meant as a discipline of mystical thought and action). That is what we find in his own introduction of calligraphy in many paintings as well as in his love for paper (although the Fabriano paper is not the traditional Japanese rice paper!) or in his quest for a perspective of peace and faith, stimulated by the encounters with figures that were so important for his own internal search.
This is also confirmed by the motto "Art and Peace" introducing his website, remembering that the most important trace we leave of ourselves today is the one in the worldwide web. In these words is the synthesis of his path between painting, philosophy, meditation and faith. The result of this process is clearly the inadequacy of the traditional boundaries of the canvas, while his imagination spreads over all the surfaces of the painting, including the frame and the back. This operation can lead up to the ironic seriousness of the programatic idea of the "Fronteversismo", i.e. "back-and-frontism", movement, where the spatial dimension becomes a pictorial statement, in an everlasting dialog with the relevance of the voids as taught by the zen philosophy.
The painting as an object (an issue today almost forgotten by contemporary art) seems to be a reliable reference for an expression that wants to keep itself in the realm of "recognizability" without always referring to schools or tendencies. We are here in front of an extremely personal, intimate and autobiographical message that roots itself in the primitive need of sharing the crucial discoveries of one's own life experience.
Siniscalchi's words testify how his paintings are to be read as a "non-verbal diary" that recounts how his artistic sensibility shaped through the various passages of life: from child and son to adult, husband and father. Giuseppe's work is in conclusion always ready to account for the past without neglecting the many variables that animate the future of his polyvalent figure: painter, attorney, Japanese culture expert and man of faith.
______________________
Professor
Onelio Onofrio Francioso (journalist, writer, sociologist, jurist)
The computable strength of the incommensurate spirit
Suddenly, the destiny granted me the chance to reach a contemplative state in front of the paintings of Giuseppe Siniscalchi. I believe to have found there the answers to some of the questions that haunt me since when, as an instinctive user, I approached art for the first time. I always wondered: “What is art? Who is the artist?” Better than in the words or writings of many experts and academics, I found in Giuseppe’s paintings a revitalizing effect. The artist is no eccentric bohemian, rather he is simply a sensitive human being, that cannot avoid lightning up when a sudden creative force invades him. Giuseppe’s works are all outside of a temporal frame, they recall our most archaic perceptions. Prehistoric Graffiti prove that creativity and curiosity stem from a candid openness to life. My first impressions were these: in these paintings I found the genuineness of a simple, candid, frank spirit, nostalgically expressing itself. A spirit touched by its own feelings, brought as an eternal and pedagogical witness for the primordial unconsciousness. Repealing all the evil forces of the complexity our time, here we find the pure desire of straightforward communication. Giuseppe Siniscalchi is outside of any interpretative scheme. His work lives as a witness of the divine immanence of the creative emotion and its transmission, in world ruled by total serenity. His spontaneous search for the simplest and yet most mysterious divine order, far away from the complexities with which we, as humans, fill our everyday reality, in an attempt to substitute our world to the divine revelation. In Giuseppe’s touch and colours we instead find a total respect and thanksgiving to the Eternal, an entity always promising intense emotions for our future, which we may already live in nostalgic waiting. His works cannot be framed, because they strive for infinity and perfect stillness, in a message of complete peace. Art denies every barrier in space and time, it is able to touch the heart, mind and soul of everybody, everywhere. Art instils joy without offence: it is the thanksgiving of humility in full respect of sacredness, the desire of a dust grain aspiring to leave a sign of love for eternal life. Art reflects dreams in a concrete (although extremely delicate) mirror, offering men his only possible redemption. All these considerations came to me through the ennoblement of my soul that Giuseppe’s paintings have made possible.
______________________
Professor Gabriele Guglielmino (professor, art critic and historian)
The silent and restless figurative wisdom
At first, I could not fully understand the requirements that a critical assessment of Giuseppe Siniscalchi’s works would have implied. I thought that they were simply nice paintings, made by a sensitive and careful person. I discovered only later which broad philological study was necessary to prepare spiritually for this art. For me, after many years of academic work in the field, it was as starting everything anew, in a return to a certainly happier childhood. I was expecting to carry out a cultural duty, and instead found out that I was receiving a spiritual benefit: a new key to read the world and human life. To fully understand Siniscalchi’s work we must first of all remember that he is, I would say, an artist that only lately discovered his talent, being able to apply the analytical precision of his main field of activity (law) into his artistic activity. Siniscalchi waited for a long time before choosing to make his production public, such that all the pieces of the puzzle could be ready for the audience right from the beginning.
This necessity of visual and cultural synthesis leads the
artist to not neglige the back of the canvas, often
depicting a verbal subject that lights up the curiosity of
who is looking at the painting, which becomes an
object-work. The word "Backandfrontism" to describe this
discovery is a wonderful choice, because it already has the
potential to become the basis of a new cultural movement.
The interaction between the front and the back of the canvas
brings the work of art beyond the limits of the traditional
frame, thus inviting us to look for the beauty and thruth
that is not on the surface.
His attempt in art is comparable to what was attempted by Marsilio Ficino and his Accademia Neoplatonica, in the Renaissance, at the court of Lorenzo il Magnifico in Florence. While they searched for a harmonization of the pagan and Christian worlds, here the link is between the Western and the Eastern tradition.
In paintings as “Dawn on the lake” or “Dawn on the mountain”, although the artist was in his twenties, we are already able to find a complete expressivity, with all the characters that will form his linguistic koiné. In perfectly serene landscapes, a small figure, probably the artist himself but as a symbol of humanity at large, appears firstly on a side and then in the centre of the canvas, in a slow acquaintance with the cosmos, always in religious respect. Nature becomes the central element in the works of Siniscalchi, developing from an initial conflicting representation (with prevalence of red tones menacing the travel of the human sail) towards reconciliation (with prevalence of blue tones, in starry skies or blue seas, reminiscent of Van Gogh and Monet). Metaphysical landscapes are here to be deemed as the loci that call for the deepest contemplation to reveal the mystery of everything. They relieve us from the secular world and bring us in an essential travel towards the sun at the horizon. The eternal dimension of those symbols is the strongest poetic force of our artist. For example his “Wa-Sun”, with its concentric irradiations of light and energy, signifies peace and solidarity, in a wonderful meeting of Western and Eastern philosophies. What in Van Gogh was struggle, fragility and drama is here stillness and eternity. The mysterious Wa Moon (for example in “Signs of peace”) spreads its light in the womb of the night in such a soft way, that in the end it flows into it, and there is no coming back. At the end of this short course, we would identify “Cross and Wa in the sunset” as the synthesis of Siniscalchi’s research. The concavity of the valley becomes the sweetest cradle where the sun sets, lighting the humility of a domestic dwelling. Here as in many other of his paintings, Siniscalchi has broken the boundaries of the frame by painting the whole canvas, also on the side and back.
We have chosen only some examples, however words cannot express the whole world of feelings that the works of Giuseppe Siniscalchi enclose, nor should they. We have thus only tried to carry our duty of cultural divulgation, leaving the rest to direct contemplation.
______________________
Luciano Mazzocchi (chaplain of
the Japanese Catholic community in Milan)
Wa-Peace
There are words that are able to express their meaning already
from their pronunciation, before any dictionary explanation.
Those are the words that have kept the pureness of their origin,
while they are the dearest and most precious to the human heart.
“Peace”, from the Latin “pax”, is for sure one of those. Its
pronunciation always relaxes on the first vowels “ea”, as if
they represented the stillness of reaching peace. Its opposite,
“war”, sounds so harsh instead.
As words, also signs and images have the power to express
directly meanings that they do not simply indicate. In the
Mediterranean, the dove and the olive branch are well-known and
unmistakable symbols of peace. The dove is such a mild animal
that he loves being run after by children, and that is why the
Holy Spirits takes this form to reveal itself to mankind. The
olive branch speaks about peace through its silvery green
feathers and through its juice, oil, an element able to
rejuvenate dry skin and reinvigorate weary limbs. The olive tree
recalls the wavy countries of Southern Italy, where nature is
mother of peace through its landscapes and through the scents of
its many aromatic herbs.
The ideogram (invented in China and then migrated to Japan) for
peace is 和 – wa. Ideograms are images and not ideas. As an image
it is the mother of many possible usages and shades. An image it
can be seen as a substantive, adjective or verb. Also in our
languages, adding the Latin word for “make”, we can construct a
significant adjective: “pacific”. In Japanese however it is the
same ideogram, without any further addition, that expresses
peace as a noun, verb or adjective. And there is more.
My trusted ideogram dictionary, the Sumigawa Kanwachūjiten,
starts by describing which influences led the Chinese to compose
this ideogram 和. The left part 禾 is the stylised representation
of an ear of rice that, in its ripening, bends its head. The
right one 口 signifies “mound“. The combination of the two
recalls then a mouth open to ask for nourishment and obtaining
it. Peace is thus, first of all, a gift of nature, work and
social solidarity. It is the gift of a providential guide to the
universe.
Let us quote from psalm 8:
"Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!
You have set your glory in the heavens.
Through the praise of children and infants
you have established a stronghold against your enemies,
to silence the foe and the avenger."
The psalmist invokes the power of the child sucking his milk to
force rebels and enemies into silence. Significantly here the
Biblical tradition meets the Confucian one: the symbol of peace
is not conveyed by weapons, but by the mouth and the
nourishment, the mouth of the child and the breast of the
mother.
My trusted ideogram dictionary gives its interpretation of 和
with this sentence: “This ideogram communicates the feeling of
peace that two people experience when they put their hearts near
one another.” Then it lists the multiple ways in which a
Japanese can understand this ideogram in its context. Yawaragu,
to soften; Yawaraka, soft; Tairaka, plain; Tairagu, to smooth
out; Odayaka, pacific, calm; Atataka, warm; Nagi, halcyon days.
The same ideogram, used in nouns, can moreover be read wa but
also kazu, as in the very common name Kazuko, Daughter of Peace,
and the masculine Kazuo or Kazuto, Son of Peace.
The ideogram 和 then combines with other to constitute some of
the most sacred words for human existence: 調和, chōwa, harmony;
穏和, onwa, warm kindness (as the benevolence of Pope Francis);
and above all 平和, heiwa, the official name for peace in Japan.
The treaties of peace drafted by authoritative men often reflect
only an equilibrium of powers, where peace is the predominance
of the stronger at the expenses of the weaker. Peace obtained
through war is not an approach of hearts, rather it is the semen
of future revolts of the defeated against the winners. Peace, 平和
– heiwa, is real only when it is also 調和, chōwa, harmony, and
穏和, onwa, kindness. Every civilisation, Western or Eastern, has
desecrated peace by resorting to weapons and spreading blood.
Far too often religions and cultures have mystified the
confrontation between groups with mutual bans and censures,
fuelling violence between populations.
Peace, 平和, heiwa, is authentic only when it is 調和, chōwa,
harmony and 穏和, onwa, kindness. Every time Nature and Man meet
up to the fusion of their beings. That is where peace originates
as harmony and kindness. Nature produces the ears of rice, corn
and all the other nourishments for life. Man pours its heart
beats and the light of thought in it. Together, Nature and Man,
are able to conceive art.
When a painter sketches on the canvas a sun, rising or setting,
it is simultaneously the work of many authors. The man with its
heart and mind seizes in himself the scene he wants to paint,
nature through the rising or setting sun dictates him what to
draw, while colours and brushes make this meeting possible. A
work of art, in painting as in music, is always the result of a
concert of human and natural.
I would like to conclude this brief thought with the image of
two hands joined in prayer. The Japanese word for this image is
合 掌 , gasshō. I was recently granted a visit by the Bonzo
Tatsusawa Nichikō, of the Nichiren school, that travelled from
Japan to visit his son Kyōichi, an opera singing student in
Milan and a regular guest of our Sunday Mass in Japanese.
Together with him I visited the Cardinal Tettamanzi who, after
his retire from pastoral activity, lives in the spirituality
centre of the Sacred Hearth in Triuggio. The Bonzo showed the
Cardinal a painting that was very precious to him: it depicted
two joined human hands overlapping with the silhouette of Mount
Fujiyama. The two shapes harmonize perfectly. The Bonzo
commented with these words: “Fujiyama is our mother earth
joining its hands, and we human beings learn from Fujiyama and
join our hands together as well. Mother earth and we, its
children, pray thus as one.”
Cardinal Tettamanzi was very touched and added an evangelic hint
to this image: “One is the hand that gives, the other the one
that receives. Together, they are the hands of love.”
In the paintings of my fried Giuseppe Siniscalchi I see the same
harmony of giving and receiving. The hand that gave then becomes
the one that receives, and vice versa. When there is
thanksgiving for both the possibility of giving and receiving,
then there is the ear of rice and the mouth, the child sucking
from his mother’s breast. The breast empties and the child’s
stomach fills up. Someday, the child will then take care of his
elderly mother. 和.
______________________
Professor Marco Marinacci (art
historian)
Signs of Peace
My first, fortuitous, encounter and
confrontation with the poetics of Giuseppe Siniscalchi
happened during an exhibition at the Museo della Scienza e
della Tecnologia. We were introduced one another by a friend
in common, and right after having seen some pictures of his
paintings on a smartphone I immediately understood that we
had the same passion for art and the same care for the
artistic heritage of our country. Another thing I
immediately understood was that his art, so full of personal
and human history, could not be addressed with the usual
critical analysis instruments; rather the whole art history
tradition was required to grasp the boundaries of such an
artistic experience.
What we see in Siniscalchi’s paintings is
not a simple story. It is only through complex and
archetypical symbols that his language reaches the creative
intuition that comes from childhood. Thus, his poetics goes
far beyond the usual aesthetic boundaries, reaching a
complete life experience and showing a strong artistic will:
the search for an epiphany that tears the Veil of Maya,
inaugurating a new world that, according to Hans-Georg
Gadamer, belongs only to arts.
The deepest message in Siniscalchi’s work
is this inaugural promise, a sign that connects the greatest
visionaries in the history of art. First of all of course
Van Gogh, from whom Siniscalchi receives the testimony of
colour and then among the others Basquiat, whose trail begun
with the traces in the Altamira caves, 18.000 years ago.
But Siniscalchi’s promise is here and
now, to carry on the redemption message that is the core of
the every great visionary art. His paintings have that
springing nature that speaks directly to our deepest senses,
to our internal infinite whose language is always composed
of signs and colours. Following Lacan, this language is also
a relationship with the “Other” through “desire”. Roland
Barthes would add that in artistic signs we are able to
recognize that infinite tension. Thus, Siniscalchi’s poetics
is a pure Kunstwollen (Alois
Riegl’s “artistic intentionality”) able to present
immediately a precise and absolute Weltansschauung (“way
of viewing the world”).
Here an ancient world, with its immediate
and elementary symbols where every creative gesture is a
linguistic universe, opens up to our eyes. Siniscalchi’s
greatness relies in his capacity of stopping one step before
the languages becomes adult and falls in that Babel of
mediation and inessentiality, spread in incompatible
cultures, societies and identities.
A common language, a new Esperanto,
appears on the contrary in these paintings, able to speak to
everybody, playing with its signs and gestures, as a child
building sand castles on the beach. Kafka showed us how
castles can become very serious adult games, while
Siniscalchi encourages us not to lose our senses in them,
rediscovering their deeper meaning. This new narrative is
embodied by the recurring little human figure, an
iconographic topòs that here becomes the first observer of
reality “outside of it”. Reality is immediately elaborated
by this little man into a pictorial universe.
For example in “Rest - Meditation after
labour”, where sunburnt varnish recalls a memory of time
gone that now, in complete rest, invites us to meditate on
our lives. It is the same subject of Rodin’s Thinker and
Francis Bacon’s portrait of Van Gogh: the innocence of the
entire humanity.
“Children games” then get more and more
complex, less innocents, as the fat pastel sign shows, in a
quarrel with the canvas, as if an invisible cat was playing
with a ball of thread in a world “beyond the mirror”, as the
one of Alice in Wonderland. In “13” the thread finds a loom
that leads it to the status of “textile sign”. It is hard
not to think of Basquiat, and the primitive elements of cave
painting. Here we would have to name many well known and
less known artists, as Norberto Proietti or Riccio, an
unrecognized Milanese painter, who were able to return to
their creative childhood again in the course of years,
thanks to a vital and playful sign. Also Milanese is the
theme of the “Climber”, as the fifty years of artistic
research of the Cenobio group (headed by Ugo la Pietra and
Angelo Verga) since their first exposition in 1962 shows.
Then comes also the engraving technique
of the “Four flowers” which reminds us of the graphic sign
mastered by Dutch painters, the same that Van Gogh
appreciated in the works of Rembrandt. It is a digging sign,
leaving a trace as the furrow in ploughed land ready to
receive the redeeming semen.
When we enter the city of “Fantasia”
(whose proper name recalls the invisible cities of Italo
Calvino) we discover furthermore a metropolis made of Lego
bricks, where a child architect, maybe the young Van
Doesburg, opposes his creative compositions to the demiurgic
model of the XVIIIthcentury Utopists (then yearned for by
the Freemason in the following century). The “Precarious
Architectures” warn us against this Hybris, returning to
the signs of Piranesi, whose forms are as clear-cut as
fragile and absurd in their equilibrium. In “Abtract” these
signs reach the pure synthesis of shapes, as in the late
Mondrian.
As in childhood, nightmares soon leave
for the stillness of awakening: “Dawn on the lake” has the
quiet landscape quality of Giotto, mixed with the dazzled
look of Henri Rousseau and the edges of Carlo Carrà. And
it is in this landscape that we find, bent, that little
human figure. It is
the same man seen in a 1888 summer night, in a desolated
café in Paris. Van Gogh is also there in ”Dawn on the
mountain”, but this time together with its friend Emile
Bernard, whose symbolism is well depicted by the cows in the
fields.
In Siniscalchi’s visionary works we are
reminded of many other painters: the night visions of
William Blake, the impulsive gestures of Pollock, the colour
symphonies of Schifano, the “Big Bang” explosion with which
Kandinsky shook up the Impressionism. “Stillness under the
moon” is still under the influence of an impressionistic
relaxation, but it is only the preparation to spring into
the vortex of Expressionism. Thus we reach an “Happyness”
very different from the Joie de vivre of Matisse and bounded
to a precise sign of redemption – a new cross – that Bacon
and many others (for example Hermann Nitsch) followed. It is
a precise iconography, recurring, as recurring is the theme
of melancholy in Munch’s works. We see it in the figure with
the hat, in the cross and in the Wa-peace symbol, in the
setting moon, in the pure reds, yellows and blues that
recompose the unity of primary colours by clumping in that
vortex.
And there is more: in that deep
whirlpool, where Dürer’s sign meets the ones of Vedova and
Kline, composing Panic visions as the ones of Bonnard, a
complete artistic palingenesis occurs.
It is the contamination with the Buddhist figurative culture
through the solid tension of the strongly iconographic
Japanese tradition. The Wa ideogram is thus a bridge between
the two worlds, as between the two original signs of the ear
of wheat (the spiritual nourishment of art) and of the mouth
(the human soul, to which art addresses), in a new meaning
of peace.
Thus we recognize that “Beacon of peace”
as the light indicating a new world, a universe emerged from
the archaic deepness of human soul, whose symbols have an
apotropaic function: a defence for the sacred and redeeming
message of a new peace.
Peace, the beauty through which art can
save humanity.
______________________
Shinji Kobayashi (art teacher and former president of
various japanese museums)
The painting world of Giuseppe Siniscalchi
The italian painter Giuseppe Siniscalchi is facing a
series of paintings where the japanese and western
traditions are mixed togheter.
To talk about Giuseppe I first of all need to tell you
an anedocte. I was in my third class (1950) and during
the lecture of western history the teacher told us about
Francesco Petrarca and his famous quote after climbing a
mountain: "The mount is under my feet". The professor
added that this example is the perfect symbol of the
dominion of men over nature. At that time I thought that
this quote was fantastic and that, in the Renaissance,
the Western civilization managed to obtain enormous
material benefits for mankind. In those years, Japan was
following the idea of copying the European model and
overcome it, shaking traditional japanese values.
In 1956, when the lust for reconstruction was heading
towards its limit, the japanese climber Maki Aritsune
reached the top of mount Manashu on the Himalaya. And
his point of view was very different from the one of
Petrarca:. In his diary he uses the words "to be
embraced by the mountain", expressing a deep symbiosis
without contrast with nature. It is the
和 (WA), the deep feeling that flows in the veins of
japanese culture. Reading Aritsune's text moved me and
since then I cannot avoid having some kind of reject for
Petrarca's quote. There my japanese identity was born.
We are more and more losing our relationship with nature
and between each other. We cannot close our eyes anymore
in front of the spiritual famine of our times, full of
instability and loneliness.
Will there ever be a way out of this crisis?
In a recent meeting, Giuseppe Siniscalchi showed me some
of his paintings and told me about my artistic vision: I
immediately thought about the Petrarca-Aritsune
anedocte. The fact that Giuseppe, compatriot of
Petrarca, is looking for a fusion between japanese and
western art filled me with joy. It is a concrete
opportunity to get out of the spiritual crisis in which
today's men are prisoners.
My first meeting with Giuseppe and the japanese sculptor
Kenjiro Azuma was indeed in 2011 at the Museo della
Scienza e della Tecnologia in Milan. From then on
Giuseppe started growing an interest in japanese culture
and searching for a form of painting where the japanese
和 (WA) could find expression. His wonderful bride, born
in Joetsu, contributed as well.
The subjects of Giuseppe's paintings go beyond any
national, cultural or ethnic difference. They belong to
a cosmic atmosphere, where the relationship between the
human being and nature can be breathed continously. It
is a symphony of the eternal richness of cosmos and
human precariousness. In Giuseppe's paintings everything
is
環 (WA), united in a round binding,
without cracks. A demand for peace for the whole world.
The two ideograms, 和 (WA) e 環 (WA) -
different but with the same pronunciation - have a
connected meaning. Everything makes me think that
Giuseppe knows that.
His paintings have a very simple structure. No technical
devices, only the essential is represented, but with so
many underlying references in contemplations. I would
like to talk a little bit of one of his paintings in
particular. In the center we can find a gracious
woman with oriental looks, while on top the moon lights
up the scene with a palely. The hands and feet of the
subject are grounded in earth as if it was born from the
womb of nature: joined with earth, daughter of earth.
Beyond time and space, we are one with the cosmos. This
is the call coming from the 和 ideogram painted
over the hat.
From this painting I could not avoid thinking also about
the
能 (NŌ) ideogram of the japanese theatre tradition. The
reason is that in the 能 (NŌ) theatre there is no break
between past, present and future. Set design are
very simple, faces are covered by masks, sound is
surreal. With the name ofTakigi Nō –
the Nō of firewood – the Nō is exhibited
also outside. In some ways, the 能 (NŌ)
is where nature and cosmos meet up. All living beings
are joined in the round link of the 環 (WA). That
is why I recognize
that there is something comunicating with 能 (NŌ) in
Giuseppe's paintings.
His effort to harmonize japanese and western art can
only be animated by 和 (WA),
universal peace. It is also a prayer for peace in the
whole world. I therefore hope that his activity will go
on in the future, to free us from the spiritual famine
that mankind is going through.
______________________
Simona Tomaselli (artist and assistant manager)
Giuseppe Siniscalchi
The other side of the moon: the one that we never see.
That is what resides in a flashing WA by Giuseppe Siniscalchi.
Siniscalchi's painting is like an arcane melody, a
prayer of sounds: sea, wind, leaves, drops of snow, sunrays,
stars shining in the night and producing an echo inside.
Everything to reconcile mankind with his most noble and
authentic values.
It is not by chance that he was born in Puglia, a land of
intense colors: the blue sea and sky, red land and strong
flavors.
An estatic ritual, ancient gestures are repeated today in a
new sacrality. Sinisclachi affirms that, understands that,
knowing his art can make its part. His painting is a
therapeutic mantra: stop for a moment and let yourself
lighten up by those living moons: WA. These are symbols at
360 degrees, embracing the back of the canvas as well, the
other side of the moon, unseen but present.
Siniscalchi affirms the necessity of being open, void, as in
Zen philosophy, to be receptive as children free from
prejudice. Go beyond appearance and routine, go towards
intercultural integration for peace, an absolute value. From
here stems his decalogue and hence his movement
Fronteversismo. The visible, the front, completes itself
only with the invisible, the back.
His beautiful wife Mutsue Sekiara and the friend and master
Kengiro Azuma have for sure influenced him, but already as a
kid Giuseppe used to analyse the themes of human existence:
war, peace, love, family as well as complex issues as the
"precarious equilibrium of accumulation". In another
drawing, "The Numbers", Siniscalchi starts his front-back
interaction by drawing numbers in the front and absent
numbers on the back. Maybe in his road to childhood
Siniscalchi reached that ancient universal womb where dark,
divine matter inspires both artists, religious men and
scientists.
We met in 2013 during a work conversation for the
interreligeous meeting that had to be organized at Museo Leonardo da
Vinci. The severe attorney revealed in time deeply akin
to japanese cultural behavior. When he first showed me his
paintings I immediately understood the potential and
incentivated his talent. From the surprise of a Christmas
calendar came the idea of a catalogue of his work for the
next year. It was not easy to bring this project to an end,
giving every painting his religeous meaning, in armony
between East and West. His muse Mutsue, idealized but
present, silent but strong, is always at his side.
After a year of hard work recomposing the narration through
Giuseppe's life, his message was clear enough to lead to the
creation of a Manifesto: the Fronteversismo Manifesto.
The contribution of M° Philippe Daverio increased our
enthusiasm. Finally, also from Japan came a precious
testimony from M°
Shinji Kobayashi. At that point the work seemed to be
done.
My most precious thanks to the friends who made this
possible, especially to Guido Calabresi, with his
encouraging "the sum greater than its parts" from USA.
Have a nice trip!
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