THE LANGUAGE OF THE HANDS

I got to know Corrado Campisi in the spring of 1997 at Portopalo – a village at the extreme end of Italy with no more than some four thousand five hundred inhabitants, mostly fishermen and agricultural workers. In this sun drenched place, where Corrado Campisi was born 41 ago, the sea and the land are not only the main economic resource. They are also the expression of a culture: that of the boats, fishing implements, work objects, vernacular architecture, urban planning, the very structure of the houses. Everything mirrors a slow and inexorable way of daily living that, together with the sea and the spray, has sculpted the faces of the fishermen and workers of the land.

The sun filled light wich blinds, and not only during the summer, gives the stones a special luminosity – perhaps also the result of the salt crystals blown across to the village by the wind: the Scirocco from the south-east, the western and the south-western breezes – from Malta and Tunisia wich are virtually next-door – and the southern meridian winds. Less than half a mile to the south there is an island, capo passero, wich can even be reached on foot, thanks to the shallowness of the sea. Here in capo passero the Ionian and the African sea meet. To the east of the village there is the island of correnti: about 3 miles away from Portopalo by sea and no more than 3 hundred metres by land thanks to a man-made road wich also serves a lighthouse.

I visited the island of correnti together with Campisi who had been introduced to me a few hours previously by a mutual friends who wanted me to see his paintings. It was about six on the afternoon, the time the sun sets. The pinkish colour of the landscape brought to mind the big romantic paintings of Frierdich and also the background to the Scream by the great Scandinavian painter Munch. I went back to the island some time later, again at the same time, and now the weather, rather cloudly, made the atmosphere leaden and metallic, vaguely northern. In the gray sand of the dunes I saw the same gray I had found in Campisi’s pictures: how come, I asked myself, that a man of the south, living in a blinding sun-drenched land, could use colours mainly – actually almost exclusively – typical of northern countries? At once I assumed it was due to the artist’s repeated journeys to Norway, The Netherlands, and Scandinavia on board petrol carriers. At the end of the 60s he stayed for a good 3 months in Cristiansun in south Norway and, during the same period, he stayed a month in Rotterdam. While there he obviously went to inspect the museum and so – I thought – he must have become familiar with the portritraits by Holbein, Durer or Cranach and have been influenced by that glacial, sculptural and yet harmonic and expressive painting. At the same time – I further assumed – he must also have been inspired by the great modern masterpiece Les demoiselles d’Avignon, a work in wich Picasso, in order to break out from classical form, and inspired by angular African primitive sculpture, interrupted the light-shade continuum making the forms less rounded.

Without a doubt Campisi has looked at and pondered on our Italian tradition 0f 1920s – the Novecento group, Oppi, Wildt, Donghi, Cagnaccio di San Pietro – and yet, looking at the light of this extreme point of Italy, I understood that the matrix of this painting was to be searched for the glowering portraits of such painter as Munch, shad, Shoenberg or Meidner. Campisi, That is, has looked at the art of the great northern painters of the end of the last century and the beginning of this and has recognized in them a kind of relationship. It is a though he had visited the same places they did and shared in their adolescent memories. This is the reverse of the path followed by Gauguin who freed himself from nostalgia for the places he grew up in, abandoning them in order to find his roots in the island of Tahiti. Campisi, instead, finds affinities and parallels between his own land and that bordering on the northern seas. In his inability to reconcile in a single unit his love for two distant and contrasting places there emerges in him a sense of nostalgia that becomes a feeling of contrast translated into a tragic sense.

In Campisi’s paintings the subjects are mainly young women with dark red lips and masculine characteristics. Portrayed half-length in dark clothes, immobile, these vaguely perverse girls with their short hair. Lacking any erotic sense and rich with impenetrable feelings, are placed in their own domestic spaces – almost as though they were part of the furnishings. The edge of the back of an armchair frequently with a Matisse-like fabric, and part of piece of wallpaper or a textile crossed over with a continuous monochrome design are the minimal elements the artist allows for his paintings’ decoration. The overall impression is cool, detached, and metaphysical, the ideal background for showing the sensual yet impenetrable expression of the girls in black. Some of these looks right in the eyes of the viewer, others avoid the gaze of whoever is looking at them. Silence unifies them and makes them part of the same existential category. What differenziates is mainly the position of the hands wich are decidedly of oriental derivation, always placed so as to give the idea that they hide some occult message. Campisi’s women find their main characteristic in the ambiguity of what is left unsaid, in not confessing transgressions while admitting some impenetrable secret. In them there is the constant need to hide from our eyes “their sympathies”, their passions and anxieties, perhaps even their ignorance, in order to show an ordinary way of behaving that will not disturb the regular life of a silent town of sailors.

Demetrio Paparoni

Syracuse, 5 August 1997