Tricase is a monumental city full of baroque architecture. The austere and sober linearity of the aristocratic homes and of the gigantic ecclesiastic architecture is continually spaced out by foliage lined festoons in a series of arches. The yellow of the carparo (type of brick), a brownish yellow from the settlement of the rock due to assault from atmospheric agents, is mixed with calcium and has become the colors, yellow, black, and white, the dominant colors of the city. It is the dominant color of Salento, a Salento that is golden where the serene rock has taken the hand of the architects and of the baroque masters. A Selento that becomes pallid and white where the popular culture has constructed lengthy one floor buildings, and a region of gray and of black where the carparo dominates.
I came to the extreme edge of Puglia with Maria Pia Pettinau and Beppe Bescina to visit the studio of a young painter
For the narrow alleys, in the labyrinth of a historical city center annoyingly full of cars we come to the studio house of Fabio, at the back of the castle in a fluttering of sparrows, sun, and swallows. The narrow and climbing steps go towards the inside. It is difficult to imagine this as a bohemian bachelor flat, with its aristocratic memories, the spaciousness of the rooms, and its balconies. Fabio Pellicano lives in Tricase, Rome, and Paris. Fabio, a young man who smiles easily, and is transparent like a piece of glass, announces to us the imminent arrival of his dear friend from childhood, Edoardo the director. Edoardo, and me once expressed, at the same time, the desire to meet up together at Fabio’s house. I just got back from a trip to Edinburgh where I assisted at the opening of his film Sangue Vivo. It is a dense film of humor and passion, grafted on the new wave of neo-dialectality that lives in many Pugliesi, such as Piva, Angiuli, Lopez, and Romano. Edoardo is now scouting out the area of Taranto in order to begin filming a new film. Oscar Jarussi, a critic who is putting together a book on cinema production in the region told me that Apulia is the land most frequented by Italian cinematographic troupes.
While we make ourselves comfortable around a table in the entrance hall, Fabio begins to show us his works, putting them together on an easel with meticulous conscientiousness, one at a time, almost as if he is repainting them. The person that is ringing at the door is Edoardo Winspeare. We greet each other and with a familiar ease he makes himself at home, every now and then heading into the kitchen to bring back something to drink. You can see that this young man from a good family feels at home here. Edoardo and Fabio are alike in that both are gentile and subtle. Being from a good family was important, he once said. The family was a guarantee. Edoardo is simple, always ready for a joke in dialect or ready to comment on a painting of his friend Fabio, with who he has had a long lasting friendship. Their friendship is ancient, made from trips together, forays together, and simple walks in the countryside or at the beach.
Fabio has just arranged a pastel on a seat in which a rectangular meadow of a tender green dominates the scene. The meadow is bordered all around by the brown of the ground. A line of trees, maybe olive, separates the meadow from the sky, a deep blue, a sort of delicate and transparent depth. Halfway down the painting and climbing towards the right there is a sloping hill in the green, which is lit up. However, there is no landscape. In spite of this, the meadow is truly lifelike and the row of trees looks as though you are actually there. I truly could not say that a photograph would be more realistic than this painting.
Fabio Pellicano maintains that he painted this painting in a certain place, a place where he has been many times with Edoardo. If I understand correctly you can get there by bicycle. It is flat and located at the sea. When there is inspiration it matters not to Fabio where and when he paints. He would paint even if it were about to downpour, or even if lunch were about to be served. He is a classic painter, one who brings his tools with him in the open air. Things like colors and a palette, canvas a scarf, all these things under his arm, or inside the carrier holder of his bike, or even in his car. Fabio paints what is real in order to be real. To do this he also betrays reality at the same time so that he may interpret it correctly.
But who is actually behind these paintings? Who is inside these works as to communicate silence and which makes you escape towards a reality that is not palpable or non material? There is the same geometry of De Chirico Square, but there are no squares. There is the same absorbed silence and there are no human figures. The figures are elsewhere, in other works that do not tend to produce a marked metaphysical sentiment. In Salento Fabio Pellicano has brought the geometry of french gardens from the 16th and 17th centuries. The Sun King of the southern Adriatic has put in his colors as well. This Sun has at his disposition a unique gardener, a bearer of hedges and of meadows, that puts the countryside and the landscape into geometric proportion. He does not look for romantic images, which are dense of tumultuous sentiment, but instead looks for a Neo-Arcadian vision, with the silence of Poussin. A painting where the geometry is sovereign and one is married to an elegiac taste and where the violence of the color also becomes sweet and above all a place of submissive questions about deep and thoughtful investigations. The paintings have precision and geometric regularity. The same geometry of Mr. Sinisgalli’s “Furor Mathematics”, equivalent to the metaphysical and philosophical abstraction, and ataraxy, which is forgetfulness of one-self, the world and of materiality. This is true even if unexpectedly these images are condensed and the reds become the reds of burning coals, poppies, and burning fires. It is an explosion of sentiments. Expressionism on which operates the hand of the tailor. The hand that trims and contours, that represses, and that labors to contain the overflowing of the heart and of the veins. These are like one who asserts himself to remain in the social and moral rules in spite of everybody.
Fabio seeks and represents the immensity and the large panoramas because in the unbounded he is able to realize a sort of communion between himself and all objects, and between himself and the creations that are unbounded. Outside the urban contexts, outside of the squares, of the inhabited centers his intuitions are born in the countryside, and it is there that he rises above the ground, like San Giuseppe of Copertino.
The meadows, the countryside, and the trees all have their own individuality, however they have not been analyzed in the pastels of this French-Salentine painter with descriptive pique. They are amalgamated in the composition, and are a part of everything. Augmenting their dispersion in the totality of the work contributes to the monochrome depths, where there are no striations. However the whitest clouds are explosions of light instead of skies inhabited by cirrus rain clouds, moons, or suns. There is no baroque, instead there is absolute geometric rationality. These depths seem to reflect again the meadows and the earthy expanse of the stages. In this way the painting progressively stretches out towards the abstract, at times reminding us of the hand of Mattioli, his indefinite cartoon hedges, and his dense and questioning colors.
The extraordinary effect that Fabio is able to obtain is one of rational hyper-realism and nevertheless lyrical. Like the effect of a controlled lirismo, I will repeat this until nauseous. This is a sign of a constant dominion of the sentiments in front of the beauty of nature and the flood of emotions. This is a sign of a non common capacity to shut in the colors and the sentiments in a sort of aquarium or monitor, or a place of contemplation where between the eye and the image there is a veil, a piece of glass, and a screen able to melt the movements, the swells, and the action.
Fabio’s paintings flow one after the other. Some examples are the white cubes of the country house immersed in the yellow, red, and green fields, the small farms of Salento, the rock walls, the olive trees, the undulating countryside , and the geometry of poppies and hay.
The bell of the cathedral tells us that it is midday. We need to get going. Fabio has reserved a table for everyone at a trattoria outside of Tricase, a place in the shade between olive trees and cluster-pines.
We leave amongst a party of swallows and begin to talk about movies, the return of traditional culture regarding the younger generations. We speak also about the meeting of rock and the pizzica. All of Salento has elected the pizzica as the regional anthem, in hopes to use it as a defense identity against globalization that is advancing ever so quickly. As our car enters the alley we begin to leave Tricase behind and enter the countryside, the beautiful undulating countryside, full olive trees, cluster pines and cane fields. In the air there is the light odor of rosemary and the sea. In the air you can feel and taste the harmony between the sun and the sea.
Raffaele Nigro