There is an invention, imagination, 

that cannot but support all of those who want to be non-dupes in structure: 

namely, that their life is only a journey. 

Life is that of the viator. 

Those who live in this lower world – as they say – 

are strangers in a foreign land.

Jacques Lacan, Les non-dupes errent (1973, 1974)

 

Wandering, travelling, walking, have always been active parts of the human journey, both within ourselves and through the world. Through a series of paintings dedicated to the existential pose of wandering, the exhibition SILENT CROSSINGS establishes a dialogical bridge between artist and spectator. This dialogue seeks to bridge those deep, intimate gaps, which dwell above or below our conscious awareness. 

Although throughout history geopolitical upheavals, environmental issues, hunger, wars, have induced humans to move and practice nomadism in search for a new life, Ciro Palumbo’s work elevates urgency from a physical dimension to a mental and spiritual one.

Stumbling upon his paintings the spectator becomes a wanderer, called to recognize fragments of his own experience within a purposefully open, symbolic framework. He becomes an active protagonist of directions, poetic landscapes and crossings – never a passive subject – in search of a dream, even just the circumscribed, fleeting but obsessive one of art. The viator evoked by Lacan, is not merely one who physically traverses the earth, but one who accepts an existential condition of continuous research, aware of the impossibility of possessing definitive truths. To be “foreigners” means to inhabit a distance, keeping the relationship open with what escapes and cannot be fully named. 

 

Palumbo balances the pictorial space through an extremely clean and polished line work, almost rigorous, yet at the same time soft and sensitive in tonal modulations. The artist confers volume, depth and atmosphere to essentially intercorporeal figures. He regulates with love and compositional clarity the transitions that lead from the physicality of realistic elements to the abstraction of perfectly balanced color fields. Led by a talent honed by graphic compositional experience, these elements produce refined dream situations studied in detail, which nevertheless unleash a sense of variable randomness in each subject.

 

The artist defines his paintings as “actions of an evolutionary passage, poetic acts since they emerge above all from the soul and not only from objective needs”. Charged with figurative meaning, these artworks establish an immediate connection with collective experience, serving as  instruments for universal recognition even before they become subjects of interpretation.

 

Standing before them implies a shared silent attitude, a meditated existential pose within ourselves, a mature and iconic fruit of the individual’s experiences that resonate with the experiences of the entire community. Such transition of thought evolves in suspended territories; scenarios that seem to belong simultaneously to memory and imagination, to remembrance and prediction. They are spaces that are configured as authentic non-places of the mind, places-elsewhere in which the usual coordinates of existence are momentarily deactivated to allow a more intimate, universal dimension to emerge.

 

Ciro Palumbo manifests the deep awareness that art, much like life, is a journey without destination through the world that offers neither answers nor certainties, but which broadens the questions of existence.