"A phasmid has made its body the scenery in which to hide, incorporating that same
scenery as the one in which it was born. A phasmid is what it eats and where it lives. It is a branch, a scion, a shoot, a bush. It is a bark and a tree, a thorn, a stem and a rhizome”
Georges Didi-Huberman
“Let us now crawl,” said Bernard, “ under the canopy of the currant leaves, and tell stories. Let us inhabit the underworld. Let us take possession of our secret territory, which is lit by pendant currants like candelabra, shining red light on one side, black on the other”
Virginia Woolf
Let's get closer; the cold water begins to flow. Even if slowly, we can already hear it. Let’s stay on the threshold: murmurs or threats, oracles or echoes. It is still difficult to distinguish the cave underground voices, distant and deep. They let their call out. Who hasn’t remembered, since a child, the appeal held by those either natural or artificial refuges?
The memories that resurface, the places of desire, the rocky caves from which to peek into the world without being seen. Since the beginning we have felt the need for a refuge, for a place where to light our first fire, − “we want to be protected, but we don't want to be locked up”, writes rightly G. Bachelard. In the cave the human being experiences the spatial paradoxes of the outside and the inside, of stopping and passing, of rest and the imaginative activity of dreams, of the over there and of the
here. We pass from a sensation to another, we are incorporated and transformed by what we see, by the roaring sound we hear, by a visual and sonorous composition of a cavernous place, where even the most intimate images are condensed and where even the black color is sometimes allowed to shine, but only as long as you are sure to be able to pass through the owl eye. We can then easily realize how the site-specific installation created by the artists Filippo Rizzonelli and Francesco Zanatta can arouse, after a short hesitation reminiscent of a very first moment of fear, a sudden desire to inhabit and to gain knowledge. We stumble, we stagger on the edges of a space buried in the unconscious; surrounded by a shadow as by an initiatory cloak, we retreat into the work. The earth is moist and all the world is fruitful, so the sleeping water painted by Francesco Zanatta and installed under us speaks to us: it is the natural voice that adds sound to the landscape and makes thought fluid.
It is the water from which the artist makes his own figures emerge, materializing as a reflection what little by little he sees or imagines. Green, dark water. Water that absorbs what surrounds it and makes it a world which mirrors itself and looks at itself. A forest spring or a salt marsh, we are pleased with recognizing what we are acquainted with: grass, herbs, leaves, pebbles, twigs, without really understanding how profound it may be or how intensely the artist dreamed of its substance. Before the deep cavern of the cave we understand that what is perceived comes from very far away, that the material requires an exploratory praxis and that the artist, in an insurrectionary gesture, by kneading and mixing, tempers water, makes the earth tender and transforms the world into a kind of revolt. This is how Filippo Rizzonelli's sculptures represent the structure of the world itself, the basements of our dreams as well as the ambivalence of images: fear and amazement, desire or awe.
Large stalactites and stalagmites insinuate themselves everywhere, entangling themselves and tingling with blue, demonstrating their desire for transformation. Nymphs, naiads – the figures most favored by the artist – then seem to take shape in a crypt dedicated to hiding young women asleep or eternal bathers. But that is not everything. When we think we have already seen enough of it, it is precisely in water that suddenly we discover the life of an animal that seems to be born from the scenography itself: a crab – the beneficial symbol linked to the myths of the moon and tasked by the Sun with making the earth re-emerge from the bottom of the ocean – projects the viewer beyond the boundaries of the canvas. The aquatic animal painted by the artist Francesco Zanatta is cleverly hidden by Filippo Rizzonelli because, as we are often reminded, depth loves to hide beneath surfaces and appearances.
There we then realize that at the entrance of the cave our steps hesitate as if crossing it would mean for us to go down into ourselves, getting excited and − paraphrasing Merleau-Ponty − shattering the real world that blocks our way, while seeking symbolic satisfaction in magical acts.
Mohini Dasi Pettinato