Alfredo Romano, my friend, has always represented the younger generation of art, which has had (and continues to have) eternal witnesses in Mario Merz, Michelangelo Pistoletto, and Pier Paolo Calzolari. They embodied a naked yet learned and wise structuralism, corresponding to a continuous making and unmaking of artistic language, touched by the dialectic of eros and thanatos. This is not in the Freudian and Jungian sense, but in the phenomenology of becoming, which is primarily comedy and tragedy mixed together. This intertwining creates a tangle in which the Arcadian and the Baroque coexist. I remember his large, labyrinthine studio in a former hospital in historic and mythical Ortigia. By day, the light shone, but as soon as sunset arrived, amidst mountains of rusty beds, piles of X-ray plates, countless bedpans, and patches of mould, a sense of cold and an urge to leave would descend. Fortunately, the sun would rise again the next day. It overlooked the precarious walls of the Montecarlo or Sorrentine Hotel des Etrangers, then abandoned (but now reopened). However, if you listened carefully, it still echoed with the words and footsteps of mythical Grand Tour travellers, those who had followed Goethe and Von Platen, who then dissolved into end of the night. One evening we lingered a little longer in that old hospital, filled with remnants of pain and pity, and it grew dark; as if by magic, everything, the old mattresses, broken chairs, and wardrobes bulging with yellowed files, began to move, to come alive, seeking our frightened comfort, like imprisoned ghosts of the place.
Naturally, it all happened in my head and his. An era ago. He and I share many common readings, ranging from Louis Ferdinand Celine to David Cooper, and thus a metaphysical connection, unbroken by material distance, of many years now, which count for nothing, because it is the mental one that counts and is an indissoluble bond. I revisited everything in the kaleidoscope of Athens, with Giorgio Persano and Ileana Tounta, this spring ’24. A new chapter of an ancient poem. In this Greek, wise, and architectural exhibition of his, are shown the Objects, of his long journey into the secret, meandering places of the mind, where knowledge, questions, the physical and the post-physical are situated, where the rites of the primitive are situated invoice and the next writing, which together have mixed, the eternal alchemy of dreamlike transformation, of the diurnal ordinary, which is, at once, vision and mirage of Nightmare and Succubus. A gust of wind, now fiery, now icy, which together make a kingdom, our kingdom, where the improbable happens and at the height of the celebration, Medea's gesture intervenes, reminding us of Cronos's madness and together they devour and tear apart, space and time. A space and a time, which Alfredo Romano traverses through the streets of a solitary Syracuse, where ancient words are still heard, as in Rosario La Ciura's Lighea, perhaps Aeschylus and Plato, certainly Epicharmus, Moschus, Archimedes. And together they hold a symposium.
KLESSIDRA | EDITED BY FRANCESCO GALLO MAZZEO
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