EXHIBITION N. 101
EXHIBITION TITLE: DIES IRAE
ARTIST: SILVANO TESSAROLLO
CURATED BY: LUIGI MENEGHELLI
CATALOGUE: TESTI DI LUIGI MENEGHELLI ED ELENA FORIN
PERIOD: 6 OCTOBER 2007 – 15 JANUARY 2008
INAUGURATION: SATURDAY 6 OCTOBER 2007 at 18.30

Four installations placed under the sign of plundering, of mutilation, of disaster. Four jousts (those “with the flying seat”) that seem nothing more than residual, dislocated arms, artificial formal recollection. But the work by Silvano Tessarollo doesn’t want to give act to that continuing apocalypse that by now stands out all the things that happen in the world. He by chance puts into play the rein of the wait, of the immobility, where everything is about to finish, but in reality never finishes. The echo of antique infantile suggestions, of rambling games left intact, only that seem to last forever in space through an infinity of knots, of pieces drawn near that give the impression to resist only by grappling one on another. It’s as if Tessarollo, equaling Eliot, wanted to prop up with the fragments the ruin of his dreams. And he does it with accurate skill, with maniacal devotion, sealing every element with wax, pigments, purifying fires. He doesn’t bend at the undone, on the contrary he uses the undone the triumph of his language.

If a few years ago the artist practiced the world tender, monstrous, deliciously treacherous of the cartoons to shape “strange creatures” that carried with them ironic projections of normal life, now the crooked grace of the “fight” rise like a trail, the trail visible of a life that moves evermore towards level zero of animation. The biblical, Dies irae (which gives title to the review) evokes exactly this: the interruption of every gesture, the movement of the real to the limit of empty, “the terrible word” that announces the end of times and the turning of the years. Elena Forin writes in the catalogue: “the emptiness seems to be the atmosphere of these environments, a total emptiness and strongly described, full of wounds, drama and affliction”.

Luigi Meneghelli adds: “an extreme situation that pushes the artist toward a particular concentration, as though he has to invent himself from an exploded fragment a new sense of world”. Which is what Tessarollo looks for ruin, decide to stay within himself, as to know himself better, understand and try to stay in the same vertigo.