The time of before

“It is like the chest of the spirit that touches the limits of an unexplored place.” This statement by Savinio keeps coming back to mind as I look at the works of Francesco Barocco. All the casts he has made over the years evoke this to me. Offering the chest to the abyss. Discovering it can carve into a person the void of a never-ending free-fall and at the same time feeling its enveloping touch, that pushing which is like sustaining, like a gush of wind head-on.

I believe this is the underlying impetus to everything I have seen take shape in his studio over the years. It is an ambivalent desire that pushes forms towards a vertigo that loses them and caresses them. Savinio, in his Anadioménon, used those words to describe the mind of an artist who in fullblown spiritual disposition tackles the “phantasmic” nature of the world. Phantasmic because incipient, larval, always and once again being born. The conviction that art, like Aphrodite, are entitled to the epithet anadyomene—or she who emerges, who continuously rises from the depths—also pertains to Barocco’s works.

His works offer themselves to auroral time. Not the time of the world outside Savinio seems to refer to, but to the auroral time of the world of images, the time preceding the history of art: the universal museum of representations before they took shape in the sculptures, the drawings, the paintings we know and which were already, always existing, like the eternals, the immortals, ahead of their unfolding across the centuries. The black of the graphite thickens into spots and drawings, lines of bodies, faces that could be reminiscent of ancient works but instead are dreams, premonitions. The first crest of undecidability, the first contradiction of Barocco’s work is inhabiting changeable time in which everything that is a memory comes to mind like an omen.

His busts, his heads are heirs to the infinite succession of casts with which academies have handed down and repeated lessons from the past. His graphite lines on the thickness of the plaster bear the memory of lithographs, of drawings sketched on stone and then reproduced. His entire activity is marked by the constant study and practice of engraving, elaborated so as to duplicate painting. And yet this intermingling in his work of the more traditional languages gradually composes a world that speaks the language of the primordial, as if his works partake in the nature of the echo when the echo resounded at the dawn of time. In the darkness of a black sky which has not yet risen from the earth, the profound echoing of the syllables preceded the word and the gliding shadows announced the appearance of the image.

– Elena Volpato

This text is an extract from the essay “The time of before”, Elena Volpato, published in the catalogue “On The Principle Of Contradiction”, Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea Torino, Italy, Ed. Viaindustriae, 2021

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Photos © Andrea Rossetti