Catalog of the exhibition “Il volto di Endimione e i 28 volti di Selene” [The Face of Endymion and the 28 Faces of Selene], Galleria Cà Vegia, Salice Terme (AL), 1980, and Galleria Mercato del Sale, Milan, 1983.
This work, “Il volto di Endimione e i 28 volti di Selene” [The Face of Endymion and the 28 Faces of Selene], stems from some drawings and projects made before I left the business for ten years. I hope it is the desire to start again from where, through many vicissitudes, I had left off, that made me take up these images. The contents of these drawings and projects were common with other friends. In fact, we did an exhibition called “Una scelta” [A Choice] in 1963. This was (for me it still is) born of the conviction that, in order not to be exiled by a faceless anguish, trapped by a shapeless and hedonistic plasticism, fascinated by an empty and captivated avant-garde, we had to find or rediscover those signs, those words closest to us not to interpret them but to interrogate their places, to listen to their contiguities. Without denying the signs that had formed us, we wanted to construct images that did not avoid the distance that a culture, eliminating indifference, was creating. We wanted to face anguish not to talk about it but to wrest from it other signs to add to those in which we had recognized ourselves. It was a different stance to those who, dramatically and “heroically,” made themselves swallow it, or to those who, with the cunning of divine mirrors, believed they could possess it by knowing its limits. I chose this allegory that speaks of the night with its ambivalences, where masks, becoming silhouettes, cannot, though attempting, create faces, just as images blur among their shadows and objects summon the gaze to evoke ghosts. At night one feels less of a stranger in one’s own land.