WHITE SOMEWHERE ELSE

(Tribute to Lucio Fontana)
edite by Giorgio Rigotto

Gibo long spoke to me about the red of this artwork. I listened to him, on the phone, leaning against a maple, then sitting on the fountain, then on the concrete bench in an almost mystical wandering in the garden, while the butterbush was waiting for pruning. This is one of the many encounters with this work that I “saw” first forged in words and then on sketches and then completed in its torn, but quiet brilliance. There must be something in me that the the age fixes and completes in its own way. I watch the canvas of the disappeared “resentment”. The anger is gone. Red suggests passion, a deep breath, an aspiration. The cuts are like parted lips. Will they talk to me? I go around the artwork and enter another world, where white is intact. I have the humility to do it and from there I listen to the breath of the laceration and its song from the slightly opened lips. Kidnapped, I live the story of the canvas generated by an action performed in the solitude of a gesture that has the sound of a rustling that opens up to somewhere else with a cut that is neither a gash nor a wound but an open gap on different possibilities, new worlds, unexpected inventions of the mind, cordillera of thoughts, rosaries not recited. A void to fill. A nothing to fill. And that emotion-producing gesture still wanders in the air of this now silent workshop. And I am next to a child Gibo exhausted by a game that illuminates and messes up. “Come on, Gibo, you’re tired, even thinking about all this. Come sit here next to me that I could be your father, and breathe slowly. Rests. Listen to the song of those engraved lips too. Sleep, dream intact canvases.”