27 November – 6 Dicember 2024

Open:
27 November 2024, at 6.00 pm

Finissage:
6 Dicember 2024, at 6.00 pm
Incontro con letture di poesie tratte dal libro
Lettera aperta. In risposta
Rafael Cadenas (Einaudi Editore)

Introduce
Salomè Vuelta Garcia
Lecturer at the Department of Letters and Philosophy of the University of Florence

Metaphysics and alchemy, enormous words, full of historical reverberations, unfathomable when the use of reason is invoked. Words that can, however, open spaces for symbolic exploration or the concretization of the dream, as in the case of Paolo Caponi (Arezzo, 1941), also for the liberating trait, according to the proposal of Eliana Sevillano (Bolivia, 1947). And they seem to succeed this time in different ways, but above all thanks to the poetry that seems to keep them in check.
Both meet today in this exhibition to celebrate a poet, and with it common stories of a friendship and an era. Caponi and Sevillano lived and created in Venezuela towards the end of the 20th century. They shared a country. A country which, as evoked by the poet friend celebrated here, Rafael Cadenas, seems to search incessantly: “country/you fell asleep/between the swords/Without the promised light…”.
A town that is preserved among the vestiges of memory, like an abandoned house, demolished after the revolts of the past, Caponi seems to tell us. While Sevillano tries to recover that lost light, the one that filtered warmly through the cracks of the palm trees. “Sunny birds flew over my footprints,” says the first Cadenas, from the 1950s on Una Isla.
And between everyone’s works and the fragments there is that thread which is consciousness, and perhaps there is alchemy. A “we flourish in an abyss”, a verse by Cadenas, a celebration of the loss witnessed by the two artist friends.

Paula Cadenas
Montpellier, aprile 2024.

The book “Florecemos en un abyss” is available in the gallery. Poemas”, edition in honor of the 2022 Cervantes Prize