The square and the destroyer angel
A pictorial exibition by Luigi Latino and Pantaleo Musarò
by Gianluca Virgilio

The amateur's work is harmless and pure; that of the master is destructive and purifying Walter Benjamin

        Galatina, July 2004

        The squares of our towns have illusory scenographies, where the power shows itself in old renovated palaces and gives way, in the evening, to a deceitful show. The agora, everyone's place, becomes the place where everyone obeys the performance of the power, nourishing its strength with his own presence.
        The square is the place where western opulence celebrates its splendour with the last trendy shops, overproteced banks, and other symbols of globalization. This algid mise-en-scène could be radically confuted in the same square, if, by a chance event, a part of it were excluded by the usual representation of the power. The human beings regain possession of that surviving space and have, at last, the chance to stage another performance, which contains not only a truer interpretation of the reality in which we live, but, a message of hope for the future.
        We are in the evening. From Alighieri square in Galatina, the heart of Salento, crossing an old main door, I enter a wide crumbling place, with high vaults, like the nave of a deconsecrated and half-destroyed church. Everywhere, in full view, piled rubble, plastic tubes, debris abandoned in different corners by a careless and destructive hand. In the middle of this place, a footbridge of green cloth, faded by the visitors' steps, leads into a deep space, towards different visions from those left at my shoulders.
        Here, where carriages and horses had once sheltered and a farmer's cooperative had placed its stock, here passed the angel of history, Paul Klee's destroyer, recalled by Benjamin. There is destruction everywhere and if the arcades were not substained by strong columns, the visitor might hesitate before entering, fearing that everything might collapse. On the rough walls of this great container, that will become a fast food or a clothes shop or something like that, two artists, Luigi Latino (born in 1954) and Pantaleo Musarò (born in 1960) placed their paintings, their relationship with the destroyer angel.
        Their collaboration started with a long solitude which made them reach similar artistic results; and it is difficult to distinguish their works; their message is common not only for the will of the artists but for its inner necessity which made them choose this place in an unguarded corner of the square: a place that has to be renovated.
        The pictures I examine, with a background music by Ermanno Corrado, superimpose on human destruction, they are a sort of counterpoint and the most convincing explanation; an explanation and criticism of history not considered as a specialistic knowledge but as a dramatic product of human villany and folly.
        The art materials adopted are willingly poor: acrylic, glue, bolts, eucalyptus bark, on wood (Latino) or canvas (Musarò). With these materials the two Salentine artists, avoided every realistic temptation, try their hand at painting the abstract expression of their visions, trying not only to build an alternative path to the one imposed by the power, but to find the reasons of such a destruction and to superimpose on it the vital possibilties of a pictorical reason that tries to react to reality.
        I find, in this common speech, two similar but different visions: Latino suggests a journey through passions, hatred, jealousy, lust for power and he finds in the criticism towards modern richness the principal form of freedom from every oppression.
        Musarò is keen on the damages caused by information, by the war, the end of the sacred, the crushing of human personality. Visions mingle, integrate, they become a common speech, a common criticism of our unconscious daily life. We are not careful at the destroyer angel. He spreads disgrace and grief through the destructive hand of the man that on canvas becomes a hand that asks for help, cries out for solidarity and pity. Criticism towards richness is the condemnation of the war and of present oppressive systems that segregate men in unsuspected concentration camps and let them lose every hope in the future

        Dark colours dominate, even if the representation of the primigenital chaos is full of chromatic potentialities. The history of the human being could have been different if he hadn't got lost in the research for richness which rewards us with death, grief and every kind of destruction. For this reason, colours have lost many of their tones, focusing on grey and black. Silver and gold become uncryptic symbols of this pointless and harmful challenge.
        "I'm ashamed" can be read on a crying face, which more than a face looks like a mask, the only ambiguous concession to the representation of reality. What does that face, that mask remind us of? What human enigma? The ultimate result of this formal research is not a recrimination on the miserable destiny of the human being. This is not the ultimate message that comes out of the exibition. I realize it when I go outdoors, into the street, whose lights direct my steps towards the set route of the public scenography.
        The message is that we can imagine a true space where we can move slowly and thoughtfully. We can reach the truth of our fragile condition of men who run the risk of destroying themselves for lack of awareness.
        We can and we could act differently: why don't we do anything? Why don't we stop for a while to think about our miserable destiny?
        The questions I ask me going into Alighieri square, show that the exibition left a trace in my way of seeing things.
        They suggest that only from this awareness we can build a better world. If abstract art foreshadows a message, this is the message Latino and Musarò meant to deliver to attentive visitors.

(Traduzione dall'italiano di Ornella Barone)