San Giovanni degli Eremiti According to Madaudo

PALERMO. (sit) There are the three domes which, like sumptuous breasts, display their complex essence; and there is Palermo itself — small, layered, complex — living in the background through a few rapid, feverish, broad brushstrokes.

Beppe Madaudo’s new project is an intimate journey in search of the hidden essence of San Giovanni degli Eremiti: fourteen works on paper and panel, together with two canvases, make up the exhibition on view at the gallery L’Altro Artecontemporanea (Via Torremuzza 6, open daily from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m.) until July 31.

The Palermo-born painter — born in 1950, with works held in national and international collections and included, according to Great 20th Century Artists, among the eighty-seven most important artists of the last century — enters into dialogue with the monument, caressing its red domes with a light brushstroke, softening and dissolving their contours as though seeking to erase every trace of temporal weight.

Beppe Madaudo has chosen a different language from that of his previous works. He has abandoned the brilliant gold, the purplish red, the violent greens and blues — immersed in a sort of iconographic vision recalling mosaics — in favour of a more delicate, almost childlike vision: an intimate and complex conversation that lays bare the man and entrusts him to canvas, paper, and panel.

The technique remains the same: a mixture of Bologna plaster and rabbit-skin glue, applied either to fragile, frayed paper — produced in Acicastello through artisanal techniques dating back to the sixteenth century — or to panel. What emerges is a lighter Madaudo, less sumptuous, master of a torn, expanded, almost timeless visual language.

Alongside the works on paper and panel are also two canvases that pursue a separate discourse steeped in Sicilian spirit — itself a recurring motif in Madaudo’s work: two horses, two different halves of the same island, the black stallion swollen with red and lava, and the white horse of light.

Beppe Madaudo is like them: overflowing with passion and, at the same time, light and airy as a bird; different souls belonging to a single inexhaustible passion, violently illuminated as though struck by a sudden light.

Si. T.