The endavour of harmony and the invention
Angela Tecce
Can one be jealous of artists? Maybe not of all, of course, but of someone yes: I am jealous of Giuseppe Maraniello, delightfully for aesthetic reasons. I am not sure whether this redeems a not so honourable emotion such as envy, maybe yes, if one could motivate this emotion as I will try to do so. Initially I envy Maraniello's indulgent muse that has made him find, immediately, his path, his ‘style' and the possibility to modulate, through the years and the inevitable changes that happen around us, his own creativity around the ideas-power that are not ‘only' creative solutions but also very precise grasps of aesthetic-type positions. Aesthetics such as ‘science of the beauty' today is a philosophic discipline that is looked upon with suspect, which often provokes immediately limitations, obligations, compliances and thus nonsense and disapproval etcetera, but a discipline that has seen tiring elaborations of the best philosophic minds may not be cursed upon, on the contrary. I quote for example a piece by Kant to whom I give the task to indicate, si parva licet, some of the characteristics that I have found in the works of Maraniello and that contain some of the most significant aspects: “Mathematics surely do not have the minimal part of the appeal and of the motion of the soul that the music evokes, but it is only the necessary condition of that proportion of the impressions, as well in their relation and in their mutation, by means of which it is becomes possible to comprehend them and to prevent that these neutralize each other, but rather make sure that they harmonize in a continuous mutating and encouraging of the soul through emotions with their consonants and thus in a pleasant interior enjoyment” (Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Biblioteca Einaudi, Torino 1999, p. 165). They are easily to individualize, I believe, in these words, those elements of permanence and transformation, always inside a solid structuring will, that integrate, in the works of Maraniello, l'esprit de géometrie (and I apologize if again I quote the words of a philosopher, this time Pascal) with the continuous, subtle harmonic variation of the contradicting of the consisting elements of a finished art work.
In the “Museo del ‘900” of Castel Sant'Elmo, in Naples, one of these works is shown, Equilibrio, of 1978 it is a work that almost is liminar, but still here appears and already are displayed with Kant's proportion, elements that will always exist in the ‘cupboard' of flavours that Maraniello has obtained in the years after: the flat surface but from the tortured testura, the ‘perforation' that implies the call in cause for the three dimensional and lastly a plastic element to which is entrusted, behind the emulation of an human body in movement, the task to intercept the spatial ‘tensions'. The harmonious recomposing of these components, to whom we may add the pure chromatics and the linear delimitation of the creating action field that presents itself here with the maximum ‘naturalness' and that - we will learn with the years and the evolution to the works- is absolutely not a demonstration of nonchalance but the arrival of a route of poetic elaboration. A figurative distillation, which heads towards a very precise objective, already indicated in the title, the conciliation through the opposing, the state where the balance of the powers in the field finds a fragile, provisional, anxious balance. Exactly.
I would like to clarify that I do not consider the works of Maraniello, at any dimensional level, shores, on the contrary, just at the moment that the painting, the sculpture, the installation, the mosaic leave the studio, it is as if they go offshore: they travel the world bringing not only the sign of the maker that created them, but also the brand of the chess piece of art. A mandatory ‘chess piece', today, for works that absorb any material, that magnetize the burnt wood and the statuesque marble, the pigments and the mosaic cards, the rusty iron and the corten steel, the gold and the silver, the bronze and the canvas… a catalogue of materials that explain the huge ambition of the artist: the ambition of offering shelter to dispersed things and by the implicit consumption of the needless, a strange word to the world of art where everything is needed. Creating is like ‘re-creating', one replaces on this earth a piece of wood eroded by time putting it into contact with a wire of steel to which is hung a mysterious object. But one recreates, in the things, through, the things, also a state of mind, hope, the dream of an ‘elsewhere' of beauty. What is striking in the production of the artist is the capacity to subordinate, to the formal balance of the work, the numerous tensions that he creates internally, and I am not just talking about of the ‘nice compound' – to use a dear expression to the baroque treatise with whom they indicated the admiration of the spectators with whom an artist succeeded to subordinate painting, sculptures and decoration to the successful final image- through which he succeeded to modulate plastically diverse elements, but I mean principally his capacity to ‘close' the shape.
Indeed, nevertheless the overlapping of the layers, the weaving of the materials, the tangling of the plastic motifs, no works of Maraniello, not even those who ‘launch' themselves recklessly into the space, lose the necessity to put down the seal of ‘finished'.
A ‘finished', that is made of a formal perfection, of impeccable point of detail, of balance.
In the light of this completeness of the image, in which one solves the creative tensions and figurative tensions, a different sense is also adapted to the traces, the memories, the contributions of the artists that left in the creativity of Maraniello, a recognizable sign, through which it is easier to enter this various but coherent world, of immaculate faith in the destiny of redemption of the art but still at the same time eaten by doubt, by uncertainty, by anxiety of the emptiness. The ability to trace the limit within which have the elements play the composition, the way to not bring down the work by the tensions between the elements that compose it, the ability with whom Maraniello inserts in his works, also in those plastically more accomplished, a subtle sense of instability, that slight uncertainty of someone who is not completely sure of the surface on which he is walking, cannot be a second thought. And this is the ‘symptom' of the modern world of an artist, giving the illusionary conviction of pacification, of reaching the world of art, except making us then re-believe again with an unexpected backlash, because believing in beauty is like walking on a thread suspended in vain, one must never abandon himself completely if one does not want to fall, because art is a game, but risky.
Your first personal show was in 1973 in the Neapolitan gallery of Peppe Morra. The introduction text is by a great critic, lettered, artist, Neapolitan poet Luciano Caruso. He moved to Florence (where he sadly passed away a decade ago) you are in Milan from the early Seventies. Is there a reason for your choice?
You have taught at a very early age at the Artistic High school of Benevento, the birth place where artists like Luigi Mainolfi, Mimmo Paladino come from, just to name some of your generation but still today it is a place where young sculptures like Perino and Velo or the Perone brothers come from. Would it be possible to point out un genius loci, a trace in the figurative archetypes of the antique culture of Campania?
What are the full and the emptiness in the space of sculpture for you today?
