At first glance Giovanni Crescimanni’s exhibition confronts us with memories and by now crystallized and dead interpretations, which catapult us into an infinite game of labyrinths and reassuring rituals. We stand in front of mirror-like paintings which reflect the ideas that each of us has, so as to accommodate as best possible then ir- representability of massacres.

In this by now habitual game in which the bombardment of television images has saturated our minds to the point of stripping from us the age-old sacrosanct recourse to a “sense of guilt” through the subliminal automatic cancellation of images which render alienating and sterile each memory, if one can’t forget, one can neither remember. This first glance leads to another rather more disquieting; the images distance us from the photographs and still-frames which indicate “the truth”.

They transmit something emotional to us, a reflection isn’t possible, we meet ‘the other’ and the other part of ourselves: “….so, because of a perverse disposition to seeing forms, languages and repetitions, he became unfeelingly a bad political subject …”, like Roland Barthes, like Giovanni Crescimanni.
Artistic expression helps us become ‘bad political subjects’, it distances us from the fanaticism of Bi and Bu, it permits us to look at and feel the horror, to face “the nameless terror”.

Proofs don’t help us to understand anymore: the instigators, the agents, the countries involved. It is sufficient to look back from the future, alter for a moment the vertex of our (un)conscious, position ourselves in hell, in the unconscious and it’s a-temporality, the place perhaps, where the metaphysical construction of Giovanni Crescimanni’s take place. A place where all is revealed without the intervention of secret services, the S.S. or similar.

Is September 11 the conclusion to a terroristic design or the beginning of a terroristic war? The distressing truth of the massacre must be sought in successive massacres: in that sick art of conceiving the ability to destroy and carrying it out in the name of a divine design. The Divine, if it exists, has nothing to do with, and should not be confused whith fanaticism. Giovanni Crescimanni’s paintings draw us into the tragedy. We understand and we see, from the crossroad of the present, that which was, and that which will be as in a borgesian “Aleph”.

I thank the painter, his paintings are as places of revelation and unfortunately of bewilderment, places of power to see, yet powerlessness to contain and transform. As in a dream in which we see dimly and interpret something unusual, these works give us elements which feed our ability to think inversely from the previously mentioned photograph and still-frame, and the use they have: the repeated attempt to destroy our faculty of thought, our creative faculty. If, on the other hand, others prefer to pay reference to “consciousness” and “reality”, they need only consult the price of the indispensable “black gold”.

Giorgio Corrente, “Presentazione a mostra “REOPEN911”