{"id":130,"date":"2015-10-17T16:09:20","date_gmt":"2015-10-17T14:09:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.giannimaran.it\/?page_id=130"},"modified":"2016-11-15T22:08:32","modified_gmt":"2016-11-15T21:08:32","slug":"licio-damiani","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.giannimaran.it\/en\/paolo-maurensig\/licio-damiani\/","title":{"rendered":"(Italiano) Licio Damiani"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Magic and the Colours<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0in Gianni Maran\u2019s Work<\/strong><\/p>\n

Licio Damiani<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s evening in Campiello Maran in the old part of Grado. The fa\u00e7ade of the antique buildings are covered by oleander shrubs \u00a0in flower, outdoor stone staircases and windows with green shutters. From the small square you can see the homonymous Calle <\/em>illuminated by a circle of light from an antique street lamp. It appears like a theatrical set\u00a0 echoing Biagio Marin\u2019s verses. (The poet and Gianni Maran\u00a0 held each other in high esteem):<\/p>\n

Mio favela graisan \/ che senpre in cuor me sona, \/ fior in boca a gno mare, musicao da gno nona \/\/ tu tu me porti el vento \/ che passa pel paluo, \/ che \u2018l sa de nalbe rosa \/ e puo de fango nuo. \/\/<\/em><\/p>\n

E tu me porti incora \/ siroco largo in svolo, \/ e corcali a bandiera \/ como i fior del gno brolo;<\/em>\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

My tongue of Grado \/ that always resound in my heart, \/ flower in my mother<\/em>\u2019<\/em>s mouth, \/ made music by my grandmother. \/\/ you bring me the wind \/ that blows over the marsh, \/ that smells of pink dawn \/\u00a0 and then of bare mud. \/\/ And you also bring me \/ the sirocco in broad flight, \/ and seagulls waving their wings \/ like the flowers of my garden;<\/em>\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

We are sitting in front of the artist\u2019s gallery, enjoying the fresh evening breeze. \u00a0Gianni appears as a combination of a portrait between Yul Brinner\u2019s head and Lenin\u2019s moustache and finely cut beard.<\/p>\n

Traces of the Maran family go back to the times when Roman Aquileia was being invaded by Attila\u2019s horde. Many of the people of Aquileia found refuge amidst the forests in the deserted island of Grado. For this reason, a Campiello <\/em>and a Calle <\/em>bear the name of the dynasty in the heart of the ancient and noble city centre. Gianni, an extraordinary storyteller, manages to unravel hidden images in the mind of the listener. \u2026\u2026.<\/p>\n

Gianni tells the story about how his father, a fisherman, wanted him to go out to sea with him on his boat, to continue the family tradition as a fisherman and of how Gianni would refuse: \u201cI want to be an artist.\u201d, and the father\u2019s reply: \u201cI have never read newspaper announcements: looking for artists!\u201d. In the end Gianni won. He worked at the \u2018Piccolo Teatro in Trieste\u2019 collaborating with Sergio D\u2019Osmo, the stage designer and Francesco Macedonio, the director . He performed at the Piccolo Teatro in Grado\u00a0 and for a short period he also acted as beach director at Isola D\u2019Oro until the time when he decided to leave everything and dedicate himself solely to painting, which was his true calling. His goal became that of narrating the sea through his works. His\u00a0 art appears in galleries in Vienna and in Berlin, and in summer his gallery in Grado is visited by many Italian and Central European tourists.<\/p>\n

Iridescent fish, floating in the liquid red, blue and green spaces, like notes on a pentagram appear on<\/p>\n

his canvases and tables:\u00a0 \u201cleaping votive fish\u201d, as in a verse of the modern Greek poet, Odysseus<\/p>\n

Elitis. Maran named one of his personal exhibits: \u038aX\u0398Y\u03a3 . \u00a0The Greek term does not recall only<\/p>\n

the acrostic by which the first Christians indicated Jesus Christ the Saviour and Son of God, it also<\/p>\n

and above all evokes \u201cthe sea and it\u2019s abundance of fish\u201d under the movement of Telemachus\u2019s ship<\/p>\n

pushed forward by the whistling wind during his trip in search of his father in Homer\u2019s epic, \u201cOdissea\u201d\u2026 \u03ce\u03c1\u03c4o \u00a0d\u2019\u03ad\u03c0i\u00a0 \u03bbi\u1ef5\u03cd\u03c2 \u03bf\u03cd\u03c1o\u03c2 \u03b1\u03ae\u03bc\u03b5\u03bd\u03b1i. ai d\u03ad \u03bca\u03bb\u03c9\u03ba\u03b1 \/ \u03b5\u03c7\u03b8uo\u03b5\u03bd\u03c4\u03b1 \u03ba\u03ad\u03bb\u03b5u\u03b8\u03b1 di\u03add\u03c1a\u03bco\u03bd\u2026<\/p>\n

Massimo Poldelmengo, the artist from Pordenone, had already dealt with the fish theme, as a sort of<\/p>\n

logo,\u00a0 poetically allusive only of the primitive Christian symbolism derived from the graffiti\u00a0 found in the<\/p>\n

catacombs, therefore extremely archaic, stylized and simple. Maran, instead, gives it a joyous<\/p>\n

significance of mysterium<\/em>. The fish, which glides in a dense shoal on the blue canvas (Per una volta ancora istae xe blu <\/em>sings Maran along the poet Biagio Marin), is either light blue or gold as the sun or purple or red as the sunset or green as the alghi and storms and it becomes the symbol of a vital rainbow, of an imaginificent overwhelming existential adventure in the heart of the sea. Lorenzo Viscidi-Bluer wrote that without the sea \u2013 \u201cwithout its vastness and its mystery, without its colours and its odors, without the wind that comes from the sea and without the tales of the fishermen, Maran would never have been what he is\u201d.<\/p>\n

In \u201cUdii parlarmi il Vegliardo del Mare\u201d \u2013 Maran seems to be whispering along with another twentieth century Greek poet, George Seferis \u2013 \u201cI am your homeland: perhaps nobody, but I can become whatever you want\u201d. The sea, like Grado for Biagio Marin, is chosen by Maran as model of the universe, a universe \u2013 as Pasolini noted for the poet Marin \u2013 which is also created by subtraction for Maran, by reducing the variety in the world to a few essential signs, to pure, well defined\u00a0 colours, to the simple Franciscan iteration of forms.<\/p>\n

Clear bright lights, like in a showcase, enchanted spaces in a dazzling transparent magical world, magnificent colours, mixed with the radiant light of a Byzantine mosaic. In the acrylic\u00a0 on wood \u201c Il vortice della felicit\u00e0\u201d, for example, \u00a0hordes of fish, all the same, like the squares in a mosaic, create the effect of a dragon\u2019s silver tail shining through the vast blue background, similar to an enlarged detail of an earring or an embroidered garment belonging to the Empress Theodora.<\/p>\n

White fish dance and dart nimbly, they go round in great circles, they swim in orderly queues\u00a0 towards some Elsewhere. The sea is tempting and arouses the desire to leave.<\/p>\n

\u201c When you set off for Itaca \/ hope that the voyage be long \/ fertile in adventure and experience..\u201d. Kostantinos Kavafis\u2019s famous poem, visualized by the painter in polychromatic strips on a large acrylic on wood strewn with white spots like drops of foam, grained with light rhythmic segments, throbbing with large directional flags for daring navigation, struck by vertical polychromatic glowing, is the \u201cleit-motiv\u201d to the voyage into Gianni\u2019s soul.<\/p>\n

A voyage \u201cin fondo al mar trasparente<\/em>: \u2013 quoting Marin once again \u2013<\/em> cape sante a costole<\/em><\/p>\n

arcae \/ cape lisse color spale brunae, \/ cape spinose biondura insolente<\/em>\u201d. The fish bones bend, they clash with a sort of merry invigoration. And \u2013 to use the poets words once again \u2013 even if\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cle xe \u2018ndae in frantumi \/ e pur xe inc<\/em>\u00f2<\/em>ra lumi \/sora la sabia spenta e sita<\/em>\u201d<\/em>.<\/em> Their movement follows the rhythm of the rounded squares coming together on the mosaic flooring of the Basilica of the Patriarch Elijah, so as to suggest the movement of waves in motion.<\/p>\n

The vitalism of the rough and spiky \u00a0skeletons, which have however got \u201ctalking\u201d heads and big, wide open curious eyes, that recall the archaeological remains which have emerged through the years from beneath the surface of the Isola d\u2019Oro, remains which \u2013 even though in fragments, or as expressed in the dialect of Grado, \u201cgraisan<\/em>\u201d<\/em> – <\/em>maintain a fascinating, enigmatic, communicative power expressing \u2013 we could say \u2013 the soul of time. They mime even the scraps at the banquets represented in the mosaic floors of the triclinium\u2026: many varieties of fish and molluscs and their bones, heads and shells, even bones picked clean, chicken and cock heads and legs, remains of grapes and melons, nuts, apples, empty pods, peels, vegetable cores, cut flowers, dried leaves and vine-shoots as is revealed through a piece of mosaic flooring\u00a0 kept in the Archaeological Museum of Aquileia.<\/p>\n

Fish bones whose whisper can still be heard are those painted by Maran. The remains of bragozzos stuck in the mud in the lagoon on their way to Barbana flash through the mind, ribs of rotting planking, \u201c broken masts \u2013 as in Seferis\u2019s poem, \u00a0The wreckage of the Thrush <\/em>\u00a0– floating at angles on the bottom, like tentacles \/ or memories of dreams, indicating the hull, \/ opaque mouth of a large dead cetacean \/ lifeless in the water\u201d where voices, vague thirsty\u00a0 whispers \u00a0\u201crise from the other side of the sun, the dark\u201d .<\/p>\n

The painting Corpo dell<\/em>\u2019estate <\/em>\u00a0breaks into confused vertical strips of blue, black, white, yellow, green, red and turquoise, like a vanishing vision \u00a0in ecstatic extreme heat. And in Arrivederci fratello mare <\/em>,\u00a0 among embroidered horizontal strips of colours some lyrical verses appear as though stolen from the pages of a secret diary –<\/p>\n

\u201c…I take with me some of your shingle \/ some of your blue salt \/ some of your infinity \/ and some of your brightness \/ and of your unhappiness. \/ You were able to tell us many things \/ about your destiny as a sea \/ here we are with a bit more hope \/ here we are with a bit more wisdom \/ and we pass away as we have come \/ goodbye Brother Sea.\u201d
\nCeramic fish and blue enamels come out from the canvas, on satinized stainless steal rods, into reality.<\/p>\n

Maran periodically\u00a0 dedicates time to sculpturing. He is again inspired by marine myths for his ceramic and dark enamel figurines, long-limbed, elegant and sinuous, like fashion mannequins in the Vanit<\/em>\u00e0<\/em> sequence and in the ambiguous, filiform \u00a0\u00a0Agane <\/em>\u00a0ceramic, bronze and yellow cobalt speckled enamel that seem made of Venetian Murano glass. There\u2019s the\u00a0 Bagnante <\/em>\u00a0with her small disc\u00a0 hat and long low-necked dress, Poseidone <\/em>\u00a0in gold up to his waist, coming out from a blue flute, \u00a0pairing with the Dea Mare,<\/em> and the Dea del Vento <\/em>, ready to dissolve\u2026, Bacco <\/em>in ceramics and milky enamel, with a\u00a0 fine golden shawl wrapped around his head and falling onto his shoulders and chest and translating into refined synthesis the classical figure, Marte <\/em>\u00a0in ceramics, covered in antique walnut coloured enamel, the Gueriero\u00a0 <\/em>wearing red, gold and blue, recalling the Maya and Aztec idol.<\/p>\n

One could think that Maran\u2019s polychrome arrangement of fish somewhat unconsciously descends from the antique traditions of Grado, with the pressing and very sweet rhythm of \u00a0popular songs sung in occasion of the religious ceremony in honour of the Basilica (Madonnina del mare\u00a0 \/Non ti devi scordare di me, \/ vado lontano a vogare \/ il mio dolce pensiero \u00e8 per te\u2026) and hides some mysterious correspondence with the orgiastic\u00a0 sabo grando, <\/em>where wine and songs precede the Sunday of\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0Perdon <\/em>\u00a0and the statue of the Madonna is brought to the island of Barbana in a procession of boats decorated\u00a0 with flowers\u00a0 and festive banners: the Virgin Mary in connection with the sea could have distant pagan roots. \u201cO Regina del Cielo, creatrice prima delle messi\u2026\u201d(Oh Queen of the Sky, first creator\u00a0 of the harvest\u2026) as in Apuleius\u2019s\u00a0 Book of Metamorfosis<\/em> , where Isidus\u2019s simulacrum is adorned with\u00a0 a garland of roses.<\/p>\n

The strong liaison between Gianni and Grado is also confirmed in his short film Ala de Vita, <\/em>written and directed by him, and produced by Arte Video in Pordenone. The film consists in some close-ups and details inspired by some of Biagio Marin\u2019s poems.\u00a0 For the most part hands, wrinkled, weathered hands of\u00a0 fishermen and elderly women, the hands of a carpenter sawing wood for building a boat, hands pouring out wine into a glass, fixing fishing nets, rowing, cleaning fish; female hands preparing soup ( graisan<\/em>), cooking polenta; hands caressing a child\u2019s head, preparing the altar for Mass ( Me amo la to ciesa grande Elia \/ pel so silensio e per la so frescura; \/ l<\/em>\u00e0<\/em> drento quele mura \/ colone ed archi dilata l<\/em>\u2019<\/em>unbr<\/em>\u00ec<\/em>a<\/em>) \u00a0and many others\u2026<\/p>\n

There are no faces, which are cut from the picture or shot against light and therefore unrecognizable. Mankind appears through the objects, in the aura of the places or situations. \u00a0The intense and incisive\u00a0 expressiveness\u00a0 of the black and white photography, by Nino Gaddi, seems to exalt the odour of the wood and of the tar, of the tasty food of the poor, of the incense in the church, of the salty water.<\/p>\n

The figurative \u00a0minimalism, the austere inner research , the severe and plain language, the sobriety of tones, the tendency to capture the essence of things through deep expressive reserve, all recall the gradual purification of \u00a0cinemagraphy, in Robert Bresson, in his research for an essential form \u00a0marked on musical tones and his Jansenistic ethical rigor expressed through silent moments (director of\u00a0 Diary of a Country Priest\/ Curate <\/em>and of Condannato a morte <\/em>\u00e8<\/em> fuggito) <\/em>. But Maran substitutes the grave rhythm of Bach\u2019s sonatas in Bresson\u2019s works with a sweet, eloquent melodism, the deeply felt need to search for the olden times that must be recovered and their vibrant tenderness and melancholy.<\/p>\n

The fil rouge <\/em>\u00a0of the different episodes in the short film is the seagull that flies over the sandy beach, the waves in the lagoon, the Island of Barbana and the minor isles, the historical heart of Grado. \u201c<\/em> Bocon amaro cond<\/em>\u00ec<\/em>o de sal \/ tolto dal mar al fondo \/ tra sighi lamentosi d<\/em>\u2019<\/em>un cocal<\/em>\u2026\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

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The Magic and the Colours \u00a0in Gianni Maran\u2019s Work Licio Damiani It\u2019s evening in Campiello Maran in the old part of Grado. The fa\u00e7ade of the antique buildings are covered by oleander shrubs \u00a0in flower, outdoor stone staircases and windows with green shutters. From the small square you can see the homonymous Calle illuminated by … [Read more…]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":14,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["entry","page","publish","author-gianni","post-130"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.giannimaran.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/130","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.giannimaran.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.giannimaran.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.giannimaran.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.giannimaran.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=130"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.giannimaran.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/130\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":159,"href":"https:\/\/www.giannimaran.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/130\/revisions\/159"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.giannimaran.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/14"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.giannimaran.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}