Aldo Gerbino
In the circle of my life

A crack, a cut, a wisp of air goes straight through the marble’s tissue, its vertical tension, its being, its body, face, recollections... What else could drive us to recollect the importance of the oblong sense of temporality, the disenchanted melting away of gloomy hours, as if piled up on the back of the earth by an underground god, born up from beneath a sharply cut trench? It appears covered by a fluttering mantle woven with celestial anxiety, with sounds, fractures and friction. Then the scattered feeling of existence appears in all its eager severity: a lytic flower, a sharp vein of solid and annihilated hardness. This is how Enzo Sciavolino, sculptor with a Mediterranean culture approaches (with his stele in Collegno) the issue of the irrevocable flow of existence, the pivot on which to rotate one’s vision of the world. Undoubtedly, even in his deep moods, Enzo has a clear creative path. Proof of this is revealed in those vibrant, soulful engravings, paintings and especially in the exemplary layers of his dreamlike sculptures. Here, where the plans of days, the knotted ropes of decades are faced with often difficult and disheartening research, torn to shreds by the sweet yellow patina of nostalgia. But further more, this sincere artist has the ability to delve into and touch the critical intelligence of De Micheli, he is supported by poets and writers, able to win lasting friendships and loves, shared without any pretence by his lifelong companion Elsa and her attentive and participating inner joy, thoroughly expressed by her contemplative mildness – the plastic dream of sculpture becomes a cloth that envelops everything, as in his “Nel cerchio della mia vita” (a metaphor for every germinating existence). Then it turns into a gripping and overwhelming wave; a rhythm of love and sacrifice; a vivid gash of biological matter, entwined with the strength of panic in everything that surrounds and supports us. Nowadays individual reasoning genuinely reflects however social reasoning which is what the artist pertains to: a feeling for “discussion”, the rumbling of time lacerated by the ethical decay of politics, the pain perceived from a neighbour’s deafening bleeding. The sea opens up onto this backdrop on a biblical scale to give us back life; offering, nevertheless, a sign of hope. Here, thanks to its categorical and poetical value. Guttuso’s “spes contra spem” comes to light to remind us that Enzo Sciavolino’s generation – the generation that dwelled in the limelight of Vittorinian “conversation” – is the betrayed child of the agropastoral civilisation, dissolved in the fast irrepressible shattering of those peasants wisdom so dear to Montale and so thoroughly elaborated by Pasolini. Since the 1950’s, Sciavolino (a young man from Valledolmo, robbed of the rugged metaphysical soil of the Sicilian hinterland and transposed to the perspective rigour of Turin’s fluvial charm to experience all its colourless stiffness and contradiction) has been hugging the sonorous edges of history, while dealing with its watercourses, women’s profiles tied up by the classical flow of windswept hair: Sicilian women, women from the North, in a kind of half-caste view offered as a symbolic connection to his research, which attentively mitigates his expressionism. Here, the “circle” closes: and life, emotions, clouds, stone and bronze figurines go whirling, chaotically, along the Piazzale della Memoria in Enzo’s silent, passionate, agile hands.

Aldo Gerbino
In the circle of my life
dedicated to Enzo Sciavolino

Here is the face breaking up, the wing thick with albumen
and the vertical cut, the body’s cutting blow, the wound,
the blind soul everything subtends to.

And then the wave pushing the circle, the whirlpool
the billow, the lost island, the soul
of memory, the exhausted source of days.
Now the last words,
sighs, lachrymatories full of steam.

Palermo, may 2001