ART AS PICTORIAL, DECORATIVE, MATERIAL AND GRAPHIC EXPRESSION
BIAGIO PRATICO’
Giorgio De Cesario is a versatile artist who takes advantage to the utmost of his acquaintances in the several fields of his work (architecture, furnishing, design, graphics, photography, painting, sculpture) in order to build up his pictorial, material, decorative expression.
Every work of his is characterized, in fact, by an amalgam of decorative and graphical elements with sculptural ones represented above all by faces in white clay. To all appearances they are inexpressive, emaciated, eaten away by time. They come out of the canvas with their long and linear necks and with their ears refined by earrings recalling Egyptian symbols according to which the right one receives the breath of Life and the left one the breath of Death.
They are, above all, faces and bodies of women, caught in their eroticism and in their daily life, representing this way the topicality of our times, a sort of dowels of a real and, at the same time, imaginary world that De Cesario has been building for fifteen years. It is a dualism shining through all his works. An age in which, he abandons Caravaggio and Giorgione (the two artists who have initially influenced his painting and whose presence is felt in the use of chiaroscuro) and gives a new impulse to his search with the employment of new and various techniques. The result is “Procreation” where the character is a child with an amorphous face in relief and a long neck. All that has marked the abandonment of his old style. It is a spontaneous work, born without any plan at the roots.
De Cesario, nearly in trance, guided by an external hand, begins his way, with this died-face character and deals with all the fundamental problems of our society.
Even if the faces, the characters, at first sight, are not normal and seem unreal, if we observe them carefully we discover that every face has its expression in function of the purpose for which it was born. They are linked with reality through the chromatic search that sends back to Impressionism, Expressionism and is also connected with Romanticism and Dadaism. Moreover, the “Eight-faced woman” reminds us of Cubism and its shapes.
So, it is a kind of painting that conveys a message coming from a long way away. When De Cesario works, he withdraws from the world in order to live in his own world, a reality that he has imagined, where many people are having a banquet: they have been living for a long time but they do not have an expressive force of their own, they receive it from De Cesario. Summing up, we can say that De Cesario is a puppeteer, he moves the wires of their history. And not only. He makes them live with irony, not with tragicalness.
SYMBOLIC DREAMS IN GIORGIO DE CESARIO’S ART
PAOLA BERARDI
“Flowing and soft lines define slight bodies dipped in a dream dimension. It is the representation of a truth hidden behind clay faces quite similar to chilling masks in which all the expressive power of a deep spiritual communication is concentrated. The faces in relief are dramatically in contrast with the force of the linear decorations emphasized in an obsessive way by serpentine figures. The reference to symbolic dreams and to a surrealist uneasiness is obvious. De Cesario revises all that through an immediate figurative language that allows him to record a dramatic social truth.
THE ICONOGRAPHIC MESSAGE IN GIORGIO DE CESARIO’S ART.
DOMENICO SALAMINO
“The painter does not have only to paint what he sees around himself but also what he sees in himself (…)”.
This sentence, written by Hespar David Friedrich, seems to fit Giorgio De Cesario’s pictorial poetics.
In fact, what the painter sees, studies, analyzes and reproduces “in himself” is expressed through the shapes of his Art.
By digging in the sublimity of the dream, he wishes to lead us, through a particularly symbolic iconography, to a meditated reading of today’s reality.
This way he creates a real apparatus of images, made up of apparently useless things in which it is easy for the inexpert observer to get lost. An apparatus in which shapes, colors, volumes and objects create a sort of equipment useful to a communication of concepts, made also of explicitness and hermetism. In these works we can find one of the “essences” of the contemporary art: the firm will to lead observers along the “way of the discovery” and to put several messages and elements (often hidden by particular techniques), in order to reach the definition of the general contents.
It is, therefore, the interplay of many small and important facets that give, at last, a unitary entirety. In a sense, the acquaintance of the contemporary historical evolution has a lot of importance in this kind of painting.
Anyway, there is a certain reference to the symbolism of dreams, whose roots are in Freud and in Dalì. But what prevents De Cesario from recovering pure Surrealism are the continuous and explicit references to modern social troubles.
The academic learning, even influencing him, does not contrast the way and the moment of his expression. It strengthens him instead, thus determining a solid cognitive foundation.
The cognition becomes the fulcrum of the image itself. By means of his knowledge, he often reaches unexpected solutions but of clear demonstrative essence. Every work conveys exactly, what the man-artist thinks over, and so image and content become a universal heritage. His iconology is the instrument often used to reach a specific purpose: that is to lead the observer, little by little, along the winding way of understanding his message. In this context all his representations assume a value! De Sanctis writes: “The shape is not a priori, it is not something standing apart….; indeed it is generated from the contents in the mind of the artist: like content like shape “. Therefore the long and thin neck (not to get confused with Modigliani’s) and the morphologic structure of the faces, become the symbol of a new vision and a new concept of man: emphasizing the physical deformations, De Cesario delineates a new mental formation.
He underlines the concept, according to which thought, meditation and rationality are the means to understand the real dramas that, many times, gush from “merely material requirements”, from vanity, from individual hedonism. These last elements are summed up in the obsessive presence, of earrings which link the “human egoistic perversions” to the social dramas of which the same characters are the symbols. The so-called “Many-faced sculpture” is a clear example of reference to today’s social troubles as well as “The Drug-addict”, a sort of modern Cleopatra, encircled by a snake (symbol of her suffering sexuality). Another interesting work is “Anorexics”, where the characters seem to laugh at modern man’s decay and, at the same time, seem to be in search of a new aesthetic ideal. However, any work of his can be a moment of “analysis”, and an occasion to meditate. This way, art takes on a deeper meaning: it becomes spiritual and material activity by means of which man expresses his inner world made up of particularly striking images.
MASKS, FEELINGS AND COLOURS
EMMANUEL MONS DELLE ROCHE
Happiness is not obvious, Giorgio De Cesario seems to say. The characters are white men between beautiful chromatic harmonies. Moreover, they are moulded as if they wore masks, but these do not succeed in hiding their restlessness, their difficulty of living. They are white (without any colour, or of all the colours) in a colourful universe, perhaps because the artist leaves the spectator the freedom to choose his own colour; moreover appearance dissociates these beings from reality: they are unable to understand it, and so they disguise themselves in a mask (but it does not hide their feelings, I repeat). Perhaps their spirit (dissociated from the body and the external reality, which explains these long necks) is different from the “tangible” truth. In De Cesario’s works there is all that. I think only his self-portrait is different: he is only an “objective” white man, the others are black because they are the perfect unknown. But perhaps I am wrong about his intentions. The freedom he leaves implies even mistakes. Anyway, I am charmed by all that.
LONELINESS IN GIORGIO DE CESARIO’S ART
ANTONIETTA FULVIO
” Loneliness”, the title the artist has chosen, is the key-word that allows us to enter his pictorial world. A world made of loneliness, even if our age represents the triumph of communications. The sensibility of the artist wants to underline the deep sense of loss lodging in the heart of modern man, more and more overwhelmed by the fear of dreaming, of getting in tune with the others and of communicating. Even if the glamorous covers spread about by the mass media want to transmit the idea of a real collective happiness, and in spite of the capillary diffusion of the cellular phones , the satellite transmissions that cancel the geographic distances, and the great world of the internet, in spite of all that, there is a great sense of loneliness, just as Salvatore Quasimodo said. The poet recognized the existence of a sun beam that pierces through but lightens as well, so, according to Giorgio De Cesario, art can be the means to reveal human suffering, but, at the same time, it can trace a path to overcome it. Clay faces come out of the paintings, where the real protagonist turns out to be the colourful background representing the energy and all the vitality of nature, the only one, perhaps, able to fill up the emptiness we feel somewhere in our heart. (from Leccesera, 20/21 April 2002).
THE ESSENCE Of PAINTING IN GIORGIO DE CESARIO’S ART
MADDALENA CARUSO
homage to Giorgio De Cesario’s art
Rome, 04 June 2001
Innovation.
New tendency.
Spectral,
but sweet,
expressive
clay faces.
Essence of beings
stolen from
primitive caves,
reinterpreted
with meticulous
chromatic search.
Upsetting characters
rise up;
sad and dignified,
timidly
beg
aid and solidarity.
Families consecrated
By ancestral rituals.
Flares
of freedom
of the archaic
rural culture.
Light
Color
Lines
Search and Communication
The essence of Giorgio DE CESARIO’s painting.
Giorgio De Cesario: THE FLIGHT IS DENIED
Eugenio Giustizieri
When you have the courage to explore their own life, then you can also look to the other and linger, with equal ease painful open wounds, sores on that can never heal and mouths of announcing births and deaths.
And ‘this extraordinary moral sincerity to make exciting and amazing artistic production of Giorgio De Cesario. It ‘a story backwards, painted and carved from one to the last, well digging the roots of this unexpected unhappiness. In the end, nothing remains of the history of the faces and masks, except the memory of a defeat required. This defeat opens the artist’s research. With cruel ease the composition of lists of the terms through the application and manipulation of objects drawn from the past.
Already, the past. Thought can afford to go backwards, to dig in their gestures, in the looks of a flight denied, in the words of one day a year, of a previous life. It is not a trivial flashbacks, one chosen by the artist. Fragments are selected in reverse order, from closest to farthest, to find out how it all started and then ended. The strongest emotion is to see, in both cases, the theory to the test of facts, the insight that language becomes, the testing that creates a new world of images that can be received by each.
De Cesario takes the world by surprise, the fragment used to disrupt a reality more real than that which appears in the newspaper. So you constantly re-creates the metaphorical function of language, figures of men empty, stuffed who made the mistake of believing that progress proceeds in a straight line. But they demanded too much, they wanted to bite into a morsel too large for their mouths. So, from a life in technicolor, from knowledge through the excesses, the radical freedom, it’s been a blow to defeat.
It ‘a defeat which the artist tells a rush and energy, but also with a wonderful calm, almost childlike, and a deep psychological sensitivity, realizing the impressive ability to restore the climate of our times and bouncing to the heart of the rich shades of impulses, of paths taken and never stopped.
His is a gripping epic that, despite everything, exudes joie de vivre, misses everything there is to be mourned, not dodge the blade to sink into the errors and the ingenuity of our anni.Troppo hurriedly put on file. Intensity, closeness, pain, loneliness and composure are the coordinates of a humanity that exists, and believes, and hopes, and surrenders. Quietly, with the cry that is suspended
gola.De Cesario hit the target in the silence and cunning of the powerful, academics, ideology, opposed the waiting for the revelation of reality, his infirmities, his complicity with the plain people, his attention to ‘ unknown, in and out of himself. Everything is pervaded by a mysterious spirit and visionary, an impalpable thread aggregates the skies conjured an upset here and somewhere else and, with unusual ease, launches his message to the observer without going beyond rhetoric, in a sort of illusion game that can only be dismayed.
And ‘the story that the man in tattered ghosts emerge and leave the weaknesses of unique emotion and, at times, savage. And ‘the silence of muffled voices emerge that leaves human weakness, his vulnerability, his painful fantasy, until the death omens. The fate of one who is holy and damned, angel and demon.
Giorgio De Cesario. “The BE THAT (NOT) THERE ‘.”
Beppe Costa
Reading through the eyes of the heart – certainly not the critic, who I am and that, often, the heart does not have – I went on tiptoe to meet the works of Giorgio De Cesario and I found all the strength of who the ancient ‘ loves the arts (like me) and meet (as few).
I looked several times in all his work by noting the care (of course interior) that the man posed in nothing more than self, inner self.
Leaving aside for the moment, the formal description that provides (or indicates) how and why, De Cesario is aware that, in order to invent and be different from the artists they love, just love them (without making them masters or saints) and see with their eyes stimuli, the force that each author has transferred his love life, studies, work and, above all, imagination.
If you love long necks Modigliani makes them its own, or women injured by Klimt us, with eyes that look, feel and sense this taste, smell, lines, colors. As for Miro, Magritte, Mondrian and many others.
And therefore, since in this case, the artist teaches young students, knows that art must be loved, but made his own, absolutely, not copied.
If we then add the daily life that most of those who have head and heart felt, made of stupidari television and languages of art, music and poetry almost buried, here, said the first with what you want to add now, that Each then proceeds with its own culture and emotions.
The evidence, looking for my heart, is the vision of human Giorgio De Cesario tells us: pale figures, seemingly equals, free from expressions (while the colors are the background / world) to represent the loneliness inside and out of the human being. As if to say: Being and Nothingness, but a being who is always ‘out there’ somewhere else, by another self.
As he writes well and tells Maritati Maria Cristina, who lives at his side and is (apparently the same thing, but, you know that it is not). This need for “human mask”, unhappy being identified with any’Uomo ‘when it is not any, but that both would like to’ someone ‘and spends his whole life to go elsewhere to get more, to be not hardly ever satisfied. That would be correct in part for every human being in order to improve, however: “You were not made to live like brutes,” which seems rather the goal for many sciocchezzaio helped by television and the disaster that species also lives and our country especially at school where you study art and music (so to speak) only the average, only country in the world, what they indicate as civilized.
When it comes to woman’s ‘fault’ that produces his psyche is even greater.
It reminds me though not precisely the lines of Jesus Lopez Pacheco (Spanish poet is no longer published in our country) that describes something like the desire to be elsewhere:
“… Two train stops to binary opposites, each of the windows looks at the faces of those who go in the opposite direction, not wanting to go in your …”
Theme taken for life by Fernando Pessoa in poetry is a sort of summary (from my point of view) making it clear the whole philosophy and psychology of every human being that you look, you see, look. No lie.
So look anorexic ‘mental’, rounded bodies, squared positions and locations absurd (surrealistic), or broken into cubes (Picasso, Carra), but all with a totally original and courageous writing, where the faces like monsters out of clay ( we are) and not as alien as the eye can indicate a hurry.
The island is not there, the work indicates that somehow the tiny man’s detachment before the universe, though it seems a different kind (and style is), only confirms the loneliness ( in this case there is a ‘prime number’ which is sitting on the moon) and the need, necessity and duty to look the other way and from there find.
Much easier in past centuries when the relationship with nature was not physically impossible as it is now.
The spirit Phrases
“With Giorgio De Cesario, UFOs, extraterrestrials, aliens, aliens are already among us, in homes, gardens, lakes, meadows, the trees and the dream. .
And that’s the background of landscapes, or beautiful and very elegant color situations, we see these creatures moving colorless, glabrous, with long neck, making love, dance, rejoice, meditate, bathe, get frustrated, just like
us, we are actually aliens, says De Cesario, with the prophetic vision of anticipating events, which is characteristic of artists;
but its not reality, but only symbols, spiritual phrases, figures of thought, streaks of white light and freedom, which raised the anchor erubescente of the night and walk around, maybe a long journey in search of new spaces for innocence, new worlds, new heavens, new hope … ”
Augustus Benemeglio
The polyexpressiveness Giorgio De Cesario
The figurative work of Giorgio De Cesario, always accustomed to interdisciplinary expressive, Spontaneous Substance in forms is flat and linear forms as in material and in relief.
What stands eye to a digression on his very first work is a highly symbolic paintings primitivism where boundaries encompass densely baroque decorative perimeter of a soul, of color and moody.
Here the maze of signs attolle the ambiguous existential vertices dream difficult to imitate.
Here it plays the significance here is colorless De Cesario’s complex identity which, like the god Pan silvico shakes around it so much more than the presence of green floral that is larger than the moment of his desire to hide, take shelter in the cooler , blend with the surroundings in an attempt to affabulante Molca inemendabile a “Fear of living” and to appear, even if consciously perceived as a necessary step in order to consume the transit to be more mature.
As it becomes apparent, with this type of work, we are very far from the white innocence of an illustrative Henri Rousseau, called the Douanier, although a certain way of painting the landscape in large plant stems lanceolate recalls the esoteric and the famous “Snake Charmer” .
Giorgio De Cesario is no swelling or bucolic, because he is a direct child of our times that we live.
He has historically filtered, because culturally prepared, anxieties and worries of a surrealist Max Ernest, the compositions of the great figures solemn and hieratic Byzantine, African and Eastern expressionism, and equipped with all the operational elements chart – contemporaries, assimilated old and new mental symbols as iconic archetypes of possible translation, the most basic and fundamental ever.
All this cloak philosophically attractive shapes and colors with an exasperated modern life that often feeds on itself, and the thickness of mucilage solipsistic inability to communicate.
Beyond all the imperfections and Cinerama and fantastic appearances of this company monitored, beyond all stylistic artifice happy to tell us the obligation of “possession” neurotic at all costs, to us, inside and out, remains often and too often remains a substantial terrible “loneliness.”
They are witness to what many images emblematic of De Cesario, in which between the surface decorative headers to make their way, standing out in white existential, after a refreshing white “Procreation” purified the silhouette of the creature.
Truth, or the invention of our most outstanding figurative. This figure of a hermaphrodite incomparable purity is detached from the plane, the common experience, and standing out powerfully to the eye, it is proposed to life
suffered as the conscience of Christian participation (see “The Crucifixion”), becoming flesh and matter of “Mother and son”, made in “Portrait” between anonymous in an attitude expressive statues, sacred, but deified human being involved in what Heidegger calls the penalty precise identity of being and feeling, between the similar single, recalls thinking that there, responsibilities, nakedness of the soul.
Giorgio De Cesario is de facto, with these works, a cultural bridge between Western and Central European way of soul stretched vertically to a more rational control of the person and the emotional meaning of vibrant color and the eastern Mediterranean soul full of sensuality vital, full of joy and Baroque instinctual.
Herein lies the essence of this painting the author: in this contrast between the hedonism of the fund and the moral tension of the protagonist.
Julian D’Elena
Imaginative material and color: the art of Giorgio De Cesario
Faces in relief and theses in the contemplation of the surrounding world, lithe bodies, almost feline, perhaps waiting to be photographed from the eye of the mind of those who watch them, all on a decorated background where color takes on new shades and unsettling intensity.
This is the art of Giorgio De Cesario, new yet old expression if we consider the details, the sharpness of the lines, the study of color.
The faces in relief, the chromatic point out the subjects of the paintings are not only of philosophical origin, such as “Sacred and Profane” and “Fear of Living”, but very often concern issues and topical as the “Depressed” , “the immigrants”, “Halley’s Comet.”
Philosophy and reality interpenetrate, which speak to the viewer and at the same time leave him free to interpret, to fantasize, to get lost in thought for a long time to recover then lost sight of themselves in the mind, body and soul.
Maria Cristina Maritati