There was a time, when the bodies of the saints were the destination of long pilgrimages; there was a time, when the relics of the saints-a tooth, a shred of a robe, or even a small bone-were prized commodities in the commercial trade; there was a time, when prints depicting saints were diligently affixed by women in the doors of their wedding trousseaus to protect their dowries; there was-and still is-a time, when saints were venerated with the delivery of small gifts, to seal a wish or promise, or to give thanks for a grace received. These are, in this case, ex votos (ex voto suscepto the full formula) that evoke the circumstances that prompted the believer to request intercession, or are more often found simply marked with the acronym PGR (Per Grazia Ricevuta).
Figures perceived as a connecting piece between human and divine, these people with a spiritual aura were credited with the mostly posthumous authorship of miraculous events. Stories about the lives of saints abound, eventually forming the fascinating literary strand that goes by the name of hagiography, placed somewhere between history and legend. In the contemporary world, saints might be thought of as inspirational models to strive for, human and therefore possible. Yet, at the same time, transmogrified into an ideal Olympus like the one in which in the collective imagination actors and actresses, influencers, and other star system figures would be placed today.
But who will be the saints of the year 2064?
In a future that is ultimately not too far away but still appears hypothetical, amid cataclysmic premonitions, international conflicts, and strenuous struggles for equality, Tommaso Buldini and Margherita Paoletti try to give their personal answer. Drawing from their reference mythology, the two artists turn with nostalgic romanticism to the independent subculture of the period in which they grew up, at the turn of the first and the beginning of the second millennium, to imagine the saints of tomorrow in a science fiction perspective consistent with their own expressive language. If for Buldini this reflection begins with a personal rebirth that results in a return to a kind of Eden, seemingly more distant from the demonic world that has characterized his artistic production since the beginning, Paoletti reveals his darker side, recalling that the most famous saints and holy men and women in history have also been warriors embroiled in bloody affairs.
Drawing a bold parallelism between The Saints of the Year 2064 and the Bible, the works of Tommaso Buldini would be found in the Old Testament, made up of mystical visions, dense symbolism, and stories with blurred, sometimes confused and mixed contours; while the works of Margherita Paoletti would constitute the New Testament, in a consequential succession of episodes centered mainly on a character - Lea in the series of works Sonde Croniche - and his spiritual adventures. Even in antiquity, the power of images was used to simplify cryptic sacred texts, inaccessible to most people: precious cycles of frescoes, which on the walls of catacombs, churches or convents decorated sacred buildings, illuminated images on manuscripts, and even the so-called Biblia Pauperum still testify to the indissoluble link between art and spirituality, or rather between figure and communication, in times when the widespread dissemination of religious knowledge had a fundamental consolatory, but also legislative, function.
Contemporary artists make no didactic claims, but their ability to interpret the world and society is not in dispute. Thus, if we can read the works of Tommaso Buldini as a representation of a garden of delights where, however, the apples have already fallen and are dangerously verminating on the ground, in the canvases and papers of Margherita Paoletti we find a hymn to healing that starts from an autobiographical path and extends to a universal discourse.
Tommaso Buldini's 2064 is populated by bees, an insect that more than any other symbolizes life, the use of which lends itself to a wide variety of interpretations, from industriousness, organization, purity and the ability to produce and bestow wealth, allegories, these, which have found their way into science and even recent film aesthetics. One finds, then, numerous Blemmi, fantastic creatures used to represent in medieval treatises the quintessentially different, depicted with the grotesque ironic vein that characterizes the artist's work. These are often mirages of infernal cupids, or narrators of fantastic adventures, where GMO plant species are studded with human eyes. Not forgetting, in the larger works, the ringing trumpets of Doomsday, overcrowded with characters who have very little of Michelangelo's style, but whose lustful behaviors create much more empathy and entice one to follow them into their colorful world of perdition.
In Margherita Paoletti's Pantheon, on the other hand, is Kantaryocán, goddess of scars, who owes her name to the hypericum flower. This blooms and is harvested only on St. John's Day, which is when all the petals of the other flowers have already fallen into the basins of the women, who carrying on an ancient pagan cult wash their faces in it on the morning of June 24. Golden flowers, which sprout on the longest days of the year, and among their innumerable beneficial properties they also encapsulate the mystery of light shortening and thus concluding the cycle of spring rebirth. Then there is the goddess Kali, who represents death and serves as a counterpoint to St. Margaret, who, in emerging victorious from the dragon, has just defeated death. There is also Saint Rosalie, the dark hermit capable of escaping a foreshadowed fate. Out of all the saints, however, stands out a human goddess, Lea, the alter ego of the artist protagonist of the saga Chronic Probes, a parallel production to the pictorial one in which Paoletti offers free rein to the languages of drawing and engraving, even to the point of encroaching on comics. And, then, the Apocalypse can also be unleashed, where the biblical tale reaches the apotheosis of the fantastic.
On this ground, a complementarity is suggested between the works of the two artists, who make, together, an attempt to create a new epic and address to the community an invitation to find a contemporary identity on the traces of their roots. Thus, not to be found unprepared for the arrival of 2064, which is still far away, but not too far.
