Venice was the place where art and poetry met a new vision and experimentation through the representation of the REGENERATION performance by Filippo Papa and Joan Josep Barcelo creating a new way of making art, the union between photographic and performative art, holographic technology and poetry.
The Palazzo della Pietà in Venice hosted OMNISCIENT the exhibition of Papa’s photographic works and Barceló’s poems, curated by Mac Art, included in the Amedeo Modigliani Foundation Biennale. On the occasion of this exhibition, the commemorative book OMNISCIENT was published by the Setteponti Publishing House, with the preface by Paolo Giansiracusa and the afterword by Michele Lasala, where the various photographs and poems of both artists are collected. In the first part we find the twelve works of Omniscient accompanied by the twelve poems of Barcelo and in the second part, a tribute to the ten-year career of the artist Filippo Papa with the publication of ten works, one for each career year, always accompanied by poems unpublished by the poet Barcelo.
This whole concept materialized in the presentation of the performance REGENERATION at the end of April, with two representations, where Filippo Papa, live, as a visual performer, showed expressive art in his own body through a wonderful performance full of colour and interpretation, and where the poetry of Joan Josep Barceló adopted the holographic form, enhancing the act.
“Filippo Papa and Joan Josep i Barcelo travel in unison on the curvilinear paths of the universe. They adopt the same synthesis and love the musicality of silence. One captures images that push the gaze toward the Empireus, the other “rebuilds in the ceiling of the sky with every heartbeat”. It would seem that their poetics are entirely constructed by admiring the infinity that dominates our presence. Both look upwards as if looking for a trajectory that pushes the soul towards the place where everything is destined to converge. In this regard, Barcelo weaves verses as light as air, as burning like fire, and reminds us of everyone’s destiny in “asking only to die in the belly of the dome”.
Paolo Giansiracusa
“Filippo Papa and Joan Josep Barcelo, the photographer and the poet, the Sicilian and the Catalan, united in a journey called beauty. Moved by the desire to grasp, in the most varied forms of things, the most intimate essence of being, the two brave wayfarers unleash the weapons they know best. Papa does this by using light, with which he rewrites and describes the order of the world and admirably discloses that silent grammar that lies, eternal, under the heavy blanket of the visible. Barcelo does this by using the word, with which he illuminates, like a powerful beacon, the darkest and most hidden corners of the spirit of man. Two languages apparently distant from each other, but which actually show and prove to be basically the same thing. In fact, photography and poetry are both forms capable of capturing, imprisoning, freezing and crystallizing in an image or in a word the fleeting moment, the instant, the moment; what by nature is destined to live in a short space of time and then soon be swallowed up in the infinite darkness where everything is cancelled out. But art, photographic and poetic, has the strength to steal the moment that is about to dissolve from its evil destiny. At that moment there is the secret of the world, there is the whole sense of being. It is that light that pierces the darkness and illuminates the conscience of man, and that art reveals precisely. An image that, in Papa’s wonderful photos, finds full concreteness in the elegant shapes of a dome pierced by a mystical ray of sunshine. Seen from below and from inside, this almost looks like a circle of light, surrounded by the deepest darkness that eats away and cancels the rest of the church. In Barcelo’s profound lyrics, however, takes on the appearance of those words that no one understands and understands, which however herald a possible tomorrow. In one way or another, the presence of the transcendent is felt in the captured moment; the presence of what is far beyond the narrow schemes of reason. Absolute knowledge, or omniscience, whose most perfect symbol is not by chance the circle, among the forms, the one that best expresses the Umgreifende, the all-embracing of Jaspersian memory, where the possible is understood as well as the impossible”.
Michele Lasala
to multiply all hopes by four to irrigate with desire
the dome in the bud of each of the auroras
among celestial songs of guessing angels
what must be a martyrdom of symphonies of numbers
to savor the solitude of the hours that enter the night of the bodies
with a firm step on an oblique path
to fall completely into the lap of luminous forests
and of a twilight sky under the light weight of the eyes of a sun
that draws the most beautiful shadows in the world
*****
to try to sleep to talk to the angels about who is the most powerful
and to ocupy all the spaces feeling how their hands
are placed on the other hands
to feel no ties and cover nudity with rays of light
to combine their blood with other blood
to usurp the place in the shadows and not leave the fire of the circle
to ask only to die in the belly of the dome
*****
to unfold eight numbers on a distant and dark background
of the paradise of the eight gardens with eight doors
a circle of perfection in a mystical limit of light and dark
eternity between wind swirls and words between dream images and stars
to explain everything with drunkenness without depending on someone
who speaks a language that no one understands
(Poems by Joan Josep Barcelo)