Marco Emmanuele. The Unknown Glimmer Enosigèo

Marco Emmanuele. The Unknown Glimmer Enosigèo is a retrospective textual note, written following a study visit to investigate the poetics, artistic process and latest work of artist Marco Emmanuele (Catania, 1986). ‘We are like prisms, we cannot see white light that is broken down, and we cannot conceive of it as a synthesis of the coloured rays that we see, even though unity is the original given, which is denied to us and which we must separate and then connect’. (G. Simmell, Essays on Landscape, p. 29)

While writing the text for Marco Emmanuele and his exhibition Palmo Panorama, curated by Saverio Verini, the memory of the human condition, which arose from Simmel’s reading of Böcklin’s Landscapes, became intertwined between me and my writing. the memory of the human condition, stemming from Simmel’s reading of Böcklin’s Landscapes, clearly expressed in the passage quoted above, reflecting that aesthetic experience that implies physical and mental distance, as fertile ground for the German sociologist and philosopher to develop far-reaching reflections. Thus, it can be deduced that the landscape is distant by definition, so that the tension between far and near is understood as distant. And only what is sufficiently distant can be transformed into landscape, and then approached, as manifested in the work of our artist, who brings the landscape closer, placing a magnifying glass on it, so as to make it traversable.

We can perfectly compare Simmel’s starting point with that of Emmanuele, where the landscape is not at all the given in the immediacy of the natural world; a fragment of nature, a stream or a hill are not “landscape”, since landscape is not nature, which is, on the contrary, “the infinite connection of things”.

Only the human activity of the individual – who discerns and connects – can transform nature into landscape, moving away from that constructivist principle that tends to dichotomise reality.

It is wrong to separate the macro from the micro, the fragment from the whole. Rather, we must think that those same fragments of nature, in order to metamorphose into landscape, must be perceived, from partial to total, as emerging from the sum of their parts and generating a new and different unity. We must operate according to a mental process that carves out the landscape from the infinite succession of natural entities. The subject recognises a unity that is not outside and prior to the act of perception.

This is relevant in the delimitation of a boundary that has severed ties with the rest and derives its meaning as a symbol of that original unity.

Under the human gaze, an inherent property of the perceived object develops that requires subjective perception in order to be set in motion: Stimmung.

For Simmel, just as in the artist’s research, the landscape is a unity that is neither imposed nor predetermined but arises synchronously with the experience itself; it breathes in the gaze.

Following this premise, we can return to the title of the solo exhibition Palmo Panorama, examining the period and extrapolating the artist’s neologism “Palmo”, as the first person singular of the verb “palmare”, in the “sense” of being able to tactilely “palmare il panorama” (palming the panorama), with the possibility of making changes based on a subjective relativity of its perception.

That same gesture of “palmare”, born from one of the primary meanings of the term, as an adjective, as in “della palma della mano” (of the palm of the hand), has been carried over to the structures inherent in the vision of the panorama, consisting of a dense dialogue between the works on display. On the floor, layers or clods of earth emerge, imaginatively crossed by a stream, in which sparkles, unknown glimmers and enosigèe pupils gush forth.

In this sensation of floating, the function of memory opens up, a parenthesis of childhood that recalls, through the effect of steel, obtained by open casting, not working on the finished object but on the mould, the emulation of the gesture that children perform to build marble tracks at the seaside.

The silhouettes are obtained from the profiles of poets dear to the artist: Dario Bellezza, Jolanda Insana, Lucio Piccolo, Valentino Zeichen and Giorgio Caproni.

In the five compositions by the five poets, we find the importance of material, of unformed matter subject to fluctuations that continuously give it new meanings, depriving it of fixed meanings, until we arrive at the concept of the malleability of the landscape.

Emmanuele recalls Giorgio Caproni’s poem dedicated to Mario Ceroli, where the sea itself is converted into building material, that sea which, in its unknown meaning, can be shaped into the infinite and innocent forms of our mind. Thus, from the depths of the landscape, profiles of women arise, in which the breast replaces the ideal shape of the volcano. The power of regenerative creation is transformed into vital force. If we were to mention the volcano closest to the artist in terms of origin, we would certainly remember Etna and its lava flows, which over the centuries have covered the surrounding area with lava, laying bare the stratification of time.

This brings us to a second conceptual epicentre, geological time, which is as much a part of our poetics as it is of the exhibition.

“Time does not exist,” says Emmanuele, ‘in the linear and absolute form we are used to thinking about it. Contemporary physics shows that time is a relational construct, linked to processes and the observer. I think that time is not a container of events, but rather what remains when events look at each other. In this remainder, the past takes on the weight that we consider more or less precious.”

Time also affects the creative process of the artist who works with glass ‘taken from the sea’ to grind it and turn it into paint, according to a method that implies the intentionality of reducing time. Yet, the process preceding the arrival of the glass at the sea speaks of an uninterrupted cycle: the glass, which arrived on the shores and was pushed by the waves of the sea, had previously experienced the history of the object, which had therefore already been worked by man, only to be thrown into the sea, smoothed and returned to us by the currents.

By inserting itself into this natural flow, it interrupts and modifies it, generating works that, freed from the fixity of a priori meanings, give rise to new meanings, albeit dictated by an awareness that moves between the different languages of irony, childhood, and formal and material refinement, ranging from painting to sculpture, thanks to the singularity with which it vitalises light in the body of crystals.