edited by Dario Vivian
“If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”(Kafka). This phrase resounded with me – indeed, as Kafka says, it really blew my mind – as I gradually immersed myself in the vision of my friend Gilberto Perlotto’s singular Books. In fact, these are artworks that are offered to everyone – young and old- which can be immediately understood, yet they do not leave you in peace. Moreover, in a world of indifference, do we need to remain calm or unshaken by the apathy so functional to a society that wants us to be innocent consumers and passive receptors? Kafka states with extreme words: “But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide.”. The books in question, that are not apparently as shocking as the sentences of the great writer, nevertheless lead to a demanding examination of our conscience. In fact, I believe that Perlotto’s proposal constitutes a real secular meditation, aimed at measuring ourselves with the complex interweaving of time in its multiple dimensions: of the past, in which the roots are embedded, of the present, which risks losing them, of future in some ways distressing and in other ways fraught with hope. The book itself and these in particular constitute a synthesis, more so in a questioning way rather than in a decisive key. We are reminded of it by the disenchanted Qoelet, a wise Jew grappling with the apparent non-sense of life, that gives us one of the harshest books of all times: “The words of the wise are as goads, and as nails fastened”(Qo 12,11). The path suggested by the artist develops among books nailed, bound, compressed, overturned, violated by barbed wire and left to the cobwebs, books immersed in cement and eaten by mice. Yet from them emerge golden pages with thoughtful phrases, almost as to show glimpses of resurrection more powerful than any death.
Who is worthy of opening the book?
Gilberto’s Books are closed books, either because nobody opens them or even because they are prevented from being opened; they appear tied up by ropes, wrapped by barbed wire, closed by padlocks, pierced by bolts, struck by nails.It is true, there may be a rosary crown abandoned on it, but you do not know if it is a question of living religiosity or stale devotion; a budding branch is wrapped around it, an allusion perhaps to hope or maybe a sign that those volumes were left there long ago; the overturned inkwell tarrs them with the ink of a long-lost school childhood, but a straw with a nib is enough to imagine words written and rewritten to learn to communicate. The provocation of these closed books reminisces of a powerful page of the Apocalypse: “And I saw in the right hand of him who was seated on the high seat, a book with writing inside it and on the back, shut with seven stamps of wax. And I saw a strong angel saying in a loud voice, Who is able to make the book open, and to undo its stamps? And no one in heaven, or on the earth, or under the earth, was able to get the book open, or to see what was in it. And I was very sad, because there was no one able to get the book open or to see what was in it. “(Ap 5,1-4). On the one hand, I believe that the reflection proposed by Perlotto with his works can be interpreted as a subdued cry; over closed books, betrayed hopes, dismissed values, repressed liberties, commodified relations, abandoned traditions, crushed lives. There is a vein of pessimism – or at least it is me catching it or perhaps projecting it – in this act of piling books, all closed, and you almost get lost in the shelves of a library where you only breathe dust and there is no sunlight. Who still wants to open these books? Will anyone be found or will we have to resign ourselves to leaving closed those pages that have generated culture, fed intelligence, enlightened spirits? On the other hand, the artist forges them not with resignation, he offers them to us precisely because so we take care of them, he places them there as a mute and yet eloquent invocation of a memory aspiring to be prophecy, of a possible future that must have an ancient heart. It has already been said that the key of hope comes to the surface despite everything, as evidenced by the golden cuts through which dense words emerge: we cling to them, precious messages to nourish.
Take it and eat it!
Precisely to nourishment – what is culture, if not food for the soul? – another passage of the Apocalypse quotes I feel like comparing to Gilberto’s works: ” Then the voice that I had heard from heaven spoke to me once more: “Go, take the scroll that lies open in the hand of the angel[…]” So I went to the angel and asked him to give me the little scroll. He said to me, “Take it and eat it. It will turn your stomach sour, but in your mouth it will be as sweet as honey.” It tasted as sweet as honey in my mouth, but when I had eaten it, my stomach turned sour.”(Ap 10: 8-10). I do not know if our artist made the same gesture as the prophet, but one could say yes contemplating his artwork. The bitterness suffered in the guts is testified by the disenchantment with which these books, at least partly, outline the failure of a humanism, which they refer to but which they denounce as abandoned or rejected. They are mute witnesses of a contemporaneity, which too often has neither the time nor the desire to weave again the threads of a wisdom made of silence, listening, respect, gratuitousness, reflection, contemplation. The strongest denounciation is probably the memory of Primo Levi, who questions all of us from the internee number at the concentration camp: If this is a man… Horror, not just bitterness. How many pages of contemporary history, starting from the tragic Auschwitz icon, have violated the book of our common story, dehumanizing it? And yet these same books do not renounce to communicate to us the sweetness of honey, evoked by the golden bee that lands on the books, suggesting that nourishment is possible from them. The gold breaks out despite everything, because it is not possible to trample and degrade what comes from the mind, from the heart, from the spirit of the human being. If a book, due to the force of words, expands the intellectual and moral energy that is contained within it, to the point of unhinging the iron grip enclosed in it, then there is still hope. It is not by chance that Perlotto’s meditative itinerary through books finishes with the inkwell dedicated to Mario Rigoni Stern, where the bee, the gold, the gilding that recalls the sweetness of honey return. As long as someone is able to give us tales of the soul, so human, intense and true as to make us open the book to feed on it, the journey of history will advance towards an open horizon and a ray of sunshine will cut the gloomy clouds to show us the direction.