carmela corsitto

Carmela Corsitto Inter-azione della parola, 2020

Il quotidiano gelato

di Fabiola Naldi

FABIOLA NALDI: Icy daily life (2001)

Carmela Corsitto performs that hard opening of horizon that carries out itself forcing us to a second thought on reality. It is like the work made a ‘relational pression’ on the watcher. The first reaction is disorientation: what is around us must be discussed again.

In Carmela Corsitto’s work objective reality is caught in its fixity. Corsitto catches reality in its physical and existential stiffing. In this way the artist sets ‘sense’ free, that is she picks up, takes out, expresses; and in this spread of sense she catches objective reality, turns it into something else and makes it appear through mediations: perceived, passed through, transformed, possessed through an idea of reality. So a spoon becomes something different from what we expected for it to be: no longer a daily witness of comforting homely atmospheres, linked to food and convivial satisfaction. It becomes the main actor of an extreme icy thought: objects can tell us about the end and the fate of mutation we are exposed to, whenever an impredictible event, linked to the oblivion of our essence, as an atomic explosion or desertification –both examples of mummifying results- manifest itself in all its destroying power.

Influenced by social-cultural emergencies, two decades ago, we would have defined these works ‘post atomic’. Nowadays they remind us of the fact that the possibility of extreme events is not vanished beyond the horizon. We run the risk to forget about our essence of people and to be confused with things: extreme result of contemporary nihilism. What is not useful has no sense at all. Real utilitarianism is the ant- utilitarianism, as A. Callé states.

What watchers get from the observation of Corsitto’s works is the tangible presence of a careful and perspicacious look on our reality through a lens revealing sensations and emotions. Plexiglas objects are the invisible sensors of this lens. Every object has its own expressive identity revealing that inner space more mysterious and concealed than ever, that side of our living, the most private, which is not always possible to show in the reality surrounding us.

The nearly total lack of decoration inside and outside the object, the will to synthesize forms so as to create new ones gives Carmela Corsitto the chance to possibly suggest possible ‘conceptual openings’ through the manipulation of a precise matter which is turned into something new and molded again. The formal recontextualization of a precise idea formally and ideally shows itself to the watcher as a metaphor of a micro-window opened on the observation of the world. Besides, the use of Plexiglas, as if it was a ‘veil of Maya’, slowly opens itself to the watcher’s understanding, gradually making light and allowing the progress of comprehension of reality. And the watcher is not a clumsy and inattentive one any longer, but an active protagonist of a life not only dreamed of and wished for.

traduzione di Angelica Greco