Racconti muti - Silent Tales by Alessio Schiavo

Alessio Schiavo was born in Gallarate, Italy, in 1965. He studied at Milan Polytechnic where he graduated in architecture, in 1990. He began his professional career in 1992, working mainly on residential architecture and interior design, and has participated in numerous architectural and design competitions. Since 2001 he is also an Adjunct Professor at the faculty of Architecture at Milan Polytechnic. Schiavo combines constant painting research with his architecture practice, and has won national awards for painting, both on solo shows and in group exhibitions. Schiavo has exhibited alongside the Chinese artist Luo Qi, both in Italy and in China.

The latest, diminutive (15x21 cm), artworks titled "Racconti muti - Silent Tales”, by northern Italian architect and painter Alessio Schiavo, have grown out of a collaboration for a book of illustrated poems.

Though still inspired by Mark Rothko’s unique brand of Abstract Expressionism, Schiavo brings a gentle “Italianess” to his own works, an almost ethereal gentility to images romanticized from antiquity. The reduction to their present size lends these thirty pieces an ephemeral quality, a fragility conducive to the poems they stand against.

 Schiavo has added a fresh element and melded it into the abstractions. Echoing the writer’s text, but not text itself, Schiavo renders a hand drawn 'text’ that is sans text as an echo of the poet’s words. Those cursive strokes recall the “Pseuoscripts” known as “Pseudo-Kufic”, “Kufesque” or occasionally Mongol (Phags-pa) script writing. They resemble cursive text, but represent no known language. Such imitative cursive imagery pre-dates even the southern Italian faux Arabic coins from the 10th century (those from Amalfi, and Salerno). Those fake coins (called tarì) used illegible pseudo-Kufic script instead of genuine Arabic, and were no doubt caste by artisans unfamiliar with Arabic language.

More importantly though, this form of “Pseuoscript” manifests itself in European paintings from the 10th century onwards (in France, Greece and Germany), but the most important discovery is “Pseuoscript”, arabesque lettering used as ornament in Italian painting of the 13th century onward. It is used as ornament by artists such as Cimabue (Cenni di Pepo,1240-1302) using false Arabic on a mandril (handkerchief) held by a crying Virgin Mary, in his painting “Crucifix” (1265-1268). Then there was Giotto (Giotto di Bondone, 1267-1337)), painter and architect from Florence. Masaccio (1401-1428) who used this form of cursive writing for halos in the “Madonna and Child Enthroned with Angels” (1426), and not forgetting the pseudo-Arabic halos by Gentile da Fabriano (1370-1427), in the slightly earlier paintings such as “Adoration of the Magi” (1423).

Schiavo’s thirty pieces are not of silver. There is no suggestion of a betrayal of his art, but they are silent. As mentioned above, the artist incorporates pseudo-script, faux-language, into these thirty pieces, rendering them silent. The ‘language’ is false, unreadable, and therefore to all intents and purposes are “muti"  or “muto" (dumb) but not “Senza Voce”, having no voice, nor voiceless nor “taciturno” (tactiturn). The voice is the combination of pseudo-script and image, it speaks but with the language of art not of text. The abstraction, image making, and the manifestation of the illegible language sits as a counterpoint to the very legible poetry it co-exists with. Separated from the poetry Schiavo’s thirty pieces take on a substance, a voice, and importance of their own, they phenomenologically become.




See more in the next issue of The Blue Lotus magazine, out September 1st 2016