I, too, have understood through erring. Failing, I found the words. I took a step back and, in this condition of fragile evidence, mystery, and beauty, I can now tell you about the birth and the mutable journey; I can narrate a “love story” that contains and preserves the secret of its own name and appears in its unequivocal dimension of body and skin.
The “Communicating Artistic Organisms” of Sergio Mario Illuminato come to life in a relationship of declared reciprocity that takes the form of a process of repeated antagonism. It is an impassioned dialogue, a clash without defenses, an helpless dance: between the artist and the extension of his arm, an essential derivation of his essence, a continuum between being a human craftsmanship and the world, a fabric of visions, breaths, desires. At the moment of origin, in emitting its first cry, every pigment, every small portion of matter undergoes the biological existence, added to and subtracted from the creative fortress of the one who has always thought of it, wanted it, loved it. But at that same moment, it rises from the Earth, discovers its innate autonomy and forces its creator to surrender. It is not an unequal struggle and the artist, foreseeing future events, withdraws, admits his errancy, kneads failure with colors, with filaments, with substances, unable to escape what he has always known.
Every element becomes body, skin, organ: in it everything deteriorates, everything decays, everything decomposes, everything reconstructs and regenerates, everything renews with the passage of the sun and dust, the wind and the rains, the real air in its composition of nitrogen, oxygen, argon, carbon dioxide, and those other microscopic elements that take the form of seas, of territories, of the multiple activities on the surface. Every Organism recognizes its constitutive quality, a “Cosmic Fabric-Weave” that breathes the fragile essence of what it creates: it discovers itself to be a cultural device of being nature, a communication mechanism with anyone who wants to touch it, to observe it, to feel it.
It metamorphoses into a place of truth and approaches the underworld of the sublime, of the eternal spirit that underlies the eras. Stripped of simple aesthetic value, it becomes aware of its intimate solitude, suppressing distances, reaching silences and narratives, making space for everything that is not itself, that distinguishes itself from it.
It becomes a dream of the common and traces possible futures, re-creating, re-pairing, re-birthing, emerging from the present, from the hic et nunc, in a desperate will that illuminates our misery.
The “Communicating Artistic Organisms” force us to look, even as they whisper our ephemeral freedom: they demand a return to memory, to the ruins of our small souls, containing within the desperate times of our lives and our fragile communities. They reveal the love-loving-beloved of every single phase of becoming, and speak of the friable, vulnerable realities we experience in a continuous cycle of beginning and end. In each of their manifest presences, they leave to other images, to other figures, actions, voices; they take root in space, permeate it, conform to landscapes, capture its imprints, freeze them just for a moment in safe instances, then return their unforeseen transformations, representations, depictions.
And we, spectator-actors, co-creators with the work and with the artist, become part of the same game of forces, and in the symbiotic exchange of skin, an interactive interface of tensions and perceptions, we return to that forgotten day when, taking our first steps, every fall was the discovery of new knowledge and unprecedented conquests. We re-learn to see, to feel, to stretch, to intertwine, to bring forth words, foreign and immeasurable, far from being perfectible: they remain and perpetuate, without fear of being questions of love.