This can be considered a transmutation, an imaginary transliteration, carried out by a modern person who does not copy, does not identify, does not regress, but undertakes a fanciful (philological and innovative) journey backwards, to a certain Renaissance, or rather to a certain Mannerism, chosen as a strength for a contemporary dialogue, as happens when an elective affinity is established that is not diachronic, but acronic, like falling in love, an intuition that understands rationality, but combines it with emotion, in the high sense of understanding the traits of a confidential actualisation but, at the same time, of measure, of form, of technique, of style. Riccardo Lumaca's poetics makes a dynamic synthesis of the conceptual and the gestural, in the form of a tradition of the new, which interprets the two terms of tradition and new as being of a conspiracy which is not only possible, but “necessary”, in a continuous/discontinuous conception, towards the future, heretical towards the historical avant-gardes, carrying with it, before and all around, the richness of history, but without any historicist dogma of determinism and repetition, but rather as a mental structuring, of a Leonardesque type, of an invisible that is among us, not as a disturbing and unsettling ghost, but, rather, as a “golden bough” of understanding.
The Mannerist tradition appears in his painting as a great reservoir of sensitive stimuli and mental insights, in a pursuit that at every point does not start again from scratch, as in Marinetti, Tzara above all, but as a continuous appearance of dawns and sunsets, where the similar is not identical, but is the richness of an alphabet, of a visible and invisible code, which is above all atmosphere, therefore life. The new, for him, is not something other than itself: it belongs to the flow of time, which is not just Cronos, but above all BIOS, emos, poiesis, Intellect, in a dialectic of images where the past returns in forms of synchronic ecstasy, as contemporaneity which is elective affinity, nobility of spirit and not (as many erroneously believe) the part of modernity closest to us. A nexus of being in discontinuity, without sacrificing genealogies: this was his mantra, his reason for being, as understood by Carmine Benincasa and Cleto Polcina, who introduced me to him, in his humanity as discreet as it was strong and impetuous. Since then – it was the now geological eighties – we have accompanied each other for all his earthly life. He is always with me, in the form of the writings I have dedicated to him and in the plural image of two photographic works that are in my Roman home. A fine exhibition was held in his Parma: a fantastic event, in which all his expressive strength and his “taciturn” ability to traverse styles and poetics, finding himself each time, emerges.
KLESSIDRA | EDITED BY FRANCESCO GALLO MAZZEO
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