A visual grammar Vigliaturo is caught in the daily handicraft practice, which is a “magic” moment as well where the idea and the will meet the matter, where the lightness of the gesture and the movement settle in a form: the moments when his fantasy figures, dinamic and full of life and emotions, are born. Since I do not appreciate the pindaric flights of the critical thought, be it in the form of lower literature or masked as rhetorics about the symbolic values of the supporting materials or strayed from its scientific and historical competence of specific and shared values, I feel useful to bring the interpretative discourse over the plastic works of Silvio Vigliaturo back to the meaningful and actual sense of the data that contains, always keeping the comparison responsibly open between self-standing peculiarity and the wide expressive landscape that chronologically corresponds to it. The qualifying subjects in the productive process of Vigliaturo are to be found within a visual grammar – as much as they settle it –, a structural formal process articulated by that abstract rigorism which is capable of self-communicate its own results. That is, both in the single piece and in the whole work, we witness a process constantly checked by small increments, a formal linguistic experiment, severely articulated among a few structural substantives. The expressive process presents characters of linguistic self-reduction, which are symptoms of a creative will which is less interested in the narrative rewards and favours the difficulties of strictness, the linguistic scientificity of the sign, of the surface in the sculpture. As a ground of comparison and intervention, an active base for checking the two linguistic components involved – sign and surface – there is a matter, the glass. The choice of glass for Vigliaturo does not follow once again the easy rethoric of the material, where a soft enough nature points out a will for expression qualified by communication, by a process of writing carefully laid out. Glass, ancient lieu of tangible and joint communication between the short spaces of writing and the big walls of architecture, sees a compiling that neglects volume and all the secrets inseparably tied up to the history of the matter and to the sculpturing itself; according to a modern cultural project, compiling arranges itself by surfaces, by linear planes, wide in the horizontal dimension to the ground line; surfaces which are ruling and cutting signs, which articulate in revolving, which develop by wings thickly woven by the vital proliferation of new signs. The linguistic scientificity of Vigliaturo lies in this constantly severe research, played between the two already stated words (sign and surface) in their proper insertion. Beside the surfaces, which point out a reading less and less tridimensional and volumetric, it’s the use of the sign to be characteristic, to be intended both as a form of wall writing, and as a form of line, as a contour of the space. The sign that appears in slight, thread-like relief, the sign that etches and cuts the wall, is also the sign that bounds and draws, that designs the work; so appears the outline to ease the weight and the forces, and so builds the articulated border and the dialogue, as well as the curved line, in the works cycle. Upon this basis, always verified through the handicraft, these two words show a further expressive effort toward the compositional strictness, the linguistic agreement between the two constantly employed terms; the handicraft develops among differently drawn and woven surfaces, crossed by careful logical scans amidst the vertical, horizontal and circular dimensions; so it is for this creative stage, where the formal experimentation articulates and multiplies in always different works, characterized by self-government and suggestive of new, brief but meaningful, shifts.
The concept, however, is not absent at all. Drawing, be it preliminary to a painting or to a sculpture, is never an end in itself but the result of well-digested impressions, spurs and drive coming from outside which the artist wants to respond to. Every work of Vigliaturo is his own contribution to a topical interest, to the multitude of present-time suggestions. The artist talks to the world, let his opinion known through his works. A synestethic metamorphosis transforms the sound of his voice in visual spurs; the hand, the gesture and the sign translate and synthesize in one, highly expressive figure the perspective on the world Vigliaturo has. Becoming acquainted with his work truly means getting in touch with the artist, his personality and his opinions. His glass sculptures and his paintings are simultaneous to the idea that takes form in them, and the discourse that springs out is transparent, crystal-clear because the technique underlying the work production is of outmost excellence, ripened and refined through years of constant and tireless experimentation. The brave will to give birth to a personal mythology of mothers, jokers, lovers and generals [Madri, Giullari, Amanti e Generali] – distributed in a discourse flow that is never an end in itself but always interwoven with topical interest – keeps the artist immediately away from any reproach of mere craftmanship. The handicraft know-how and the consequent intimate knowledge of the matter, which surely mark his sculpture work, is nonetheless moved by the desire to get past the decorative plasticity of furnishing – as it happens instead to many other “glass masters” – translating the winding bodies of his paintings in tridimensionality, pulling them out the canvas boundary and giving the viewer the chance to walk along with them, now become imposing as a classic statue, but vibrant of the joyous chromatic power of the first avant-garde. The perennial tension between hand and mind, which drives the artistry of Vigliaturo is the basic character that, to me, has the highest value in his work as well as in every art: acknowledgment. Getting to a closer knowledge of the avant-gardes, his sign became more authoritative, his chromatic matching more emblematic and essential, giving life to totemic, archetipical works while, at the same time, his discourse became sharper, his language more catching to the point where, once in touch with his art, not recognizing it again would be impossible. Acknowledgement, even more essential than originality – which always runs after itself – is the trait that rises the artist above the crowd of imitators, just like the sculptures of Vigliaturo, unique and recognizable, rise above the public that stares enchanted at them. Andrea rodi
Vittorio Amedeo Sacco
A few years ago, I contributed with Silvio Vigliaturo to the writing of a speech about the value of technique and handicraft know-how in the creative process. That speech was given in Shangai, during the Expo 2010, where he was artistic testimonial for the Calabria region. Beyond the possible anticonceptual intent in his words, what struck me the most was the honesty with which Vigliaturo put on the same plane the gesture and the idea, superimposed in the one and only starting point of the artistic process. It’s a sort of nothingness from which a spark suddenly flies, a sign that proceeds taking form at the same time on paper and in the artist mind.
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