Rooms, Roses, Polyhedrons

Flying cellular unit
2007
Digital print on plastic grid mesh
200 x 1200 cm
Museo Cantonale d’Arte Lugano
2007

Flying cellular unit 1
2006
Collage on MDF
70 x 100 cm
















         


























Pin-Ups Cosmogony
2007
12 collage on paper
each
42 x 29,7 cm
12 c-print text by Oliver Scharpf

Rooms, Roses, Polyhedrons
Museo Cantonale d’Arte Lugano
2007

Mounira Khemir
The Eye of the Heart in the Aesthetic Paradigm
of Davide Cascio

“Some part of the motif will always be hidden from us, and there will always be some overlap”
Ernst H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion

Today, the proliferation of images plunges us more than ever into the cosmogony of immediate visual pleasure, but the essence of things may just pass us by. By way of counterpoint, the subtle works of Davide Cascio originate in the dialectic between pre- sence and absence, in their clever and astute ordering.They are produced by a unique creative process which usually results in a very particular intensity. In fact, the world of image and appearance is more than ever ob- sessed by versatility. Their flow is always becoming more confused with the real world, giving an indistinct quality to all life’s domains. However, as the Jewish wise men remind us, too many images may result in overkill. Guided by the eye of the heart, our artist receives coincidences and gets down to the essentials with splendid composure. Far from using fashionable stereotypes, he opens a way through the invisible and sets out to search for new founding experiences. He does not work in a mono-cultural manner. He creates using relationship-bonds and the eye of the heart, mapping out its creation, is just below the surface. The other is to him a fount of memory where he searches for the spirit of a place, the intuition of the moment, even if this should take some time. In these captured moments, the history of art falls short before the instant and art: the art of encounter. Did you know that in translating from Greek, the Arab philosophers had added a chapter about the inseparable intention of each action? But that was some centuries ago... It would be a pity if knowledge did not make us more caring and that is how Davide Cascio sometimes takes silence as his sole companion. He interrogates forms, as well as the void as breathing, in order to come closer to symbolism. As a proper mathematician, he sets off in pursuit of a dividing up of time and space, of the visible and invisible, the sound of words and of silence which restore the spirit of a place. Living other per- ceptible adventures is often his way as an artist open to the world. That is how, in the year 2001, during a long stay in Egypt, inspired by the May sunlight of Cairo, he had a sudden desire, seized by the golden lettering upon an indigo-blue background, to fly to Kairouan, not bothering about the viaticum, to contemplate this unique manuscript, which is the blue Koran. In his practice, utopia is not a non-place: it is a proposition, at the same time, of a good and beautiful place which may offer an opportunity of sharing sensory experience. Quite apart from the role assigned to it by a doctrine such as Sufism, the eye of the heart held an important place throughout the ancient world, in theWest as well as in the East: the eye being the center of the soul and the heart being intellectus. The knowledge of the heart is that which refers to the senses. It also has to do with savour. It is principally this mechanism which lies behind his work. In Islamic mysticism, there are four gardens, one of which is the garden of the heart. Corbin separates creative imagination from fantasy, affirming that the first is realisation of the being in an Image and a position of the Image in the being. The evocation of a memory of the sensory cannot be done in an isolated way. To Davide Cascio, imagining, sketching, inventing is done in relation to other languages, to other cultures — among which theArab culture — perhaps with this little intuitive predilection, as in an excavation, a movement of the plastic imagination going back in time. This involves a deeper, relational aesthetic; it certainly does not find its source in the reeking traces of relational aesthetics in fashion after the 1990s, the position of which is sometimes fos- tered by its own vacuity. As in the search for an initiatory time which might include other times, far from the current collapse of time. A lot of work therefore is required so that the density of time may become more transparent to some of us. This is the privilege of a true creation like the one we are given to contemplate here. It is an act against the desert of reality and against the ruin of our age. Here, nothing finishes and nothing actually begins. Mathematical abstraction unfolds upon the very rare delight of a time without memory and a space without frontiers. The labyrinth draws the individual into its sinuous meanderings, into its melodious curves, bringing him into contact with an unmoving matter, a reconciled time, a fertile meditation and self-abnegation leading to serenity. On crossing this wide-ranging alchemy, whose secret is to be found in the Arabic language, one sets off again with a teaching. This visual poem, opposite, is in itself a song about the crossing. In Arabic, the declension of words from the three letter root is like a song, a poem or semantic split. Without fear of dissonance, it combines here the crossing of the desert or of a book in the same interior movement, eluding the invisible frontiers without fear of the harmony of opposites. It is through this relationship created with other cultures that the form becomes countenance. It is by living new encounters that Davide Cascio invents new forms. As though every form were a face looking at us! Allegory, abstraction and geometric shapes, in a slow elaboration and with a spiritual awareness, he maps the outline of a work built up of other outlines. Images, like melodies, need time to exist and to make this leap into space and time from ......... to ....... . In short, from crossing to acknowledging. His projects of urban utopia are based on the human being, an ordinary human being, but reconciled with nature as well as with others. Attracted by this fraternal attitude, he confided to me one day that man is not made to live alone and that he quite naturally found a fraternal relationship during his stays at Cairo. From his poetics, one will notice that the method is an art which is not a product either of daydream or illusion, but is a way to conceive and express the relationship to oneself and to the other. As Edouard Glissant recounts, all poetics is a network. Then, the young artist progresses in his humanist creation. He also arrives at the concept through contact, not in an abstract manner, constantly wandering in other scriptural spaces. Far from relationships which are becoming more and more virtual every day in our super-cybernetic, technological era, we have yet to explore identity put to the test by otherness always in a poetics of movement.Thus, he takes his stand as a poet of perspective in search of the imaginary. According to relational aesthetics, to create a form is to invent possible encounters and to generate conditions for exchange: the sphere of human relationships as the place for art work. It is based upon interaction and reminds us that the practice of art is always relationship with the other, constituting at the same time a rela- tionship with the world.
Remote experiences which teach us to decentralize our gaze. In an over-modernized and time-accelerated world, have we learned to look at ourselves? Does this world correspond to that which we believe we live in?We must learn to think out space again, conse- quently to think out time. The artist approaches a culture in which figurative art has long been prohibited, but without failing to give a committed look. He enters into a desert of abstraction without forgetting that the desert has the gift of source. In this way, he never stops discovering that abstraction is not simply the absence of figures, but a different way of seeing. Therefore, Davide Cascio’s creation is important also for other cultures outside Western countries. His materialized images can become a vehicle for relationship, particularly in an Arab-Islamic world shifting between globalization and a more retiring identity. Much more than from the Arab past of Sambuca-Zabuth, place of origin of the Cascio family, it is through reading at random that Vincenzo Consolo enlightens a concealed tension. He reminds us that so many luminous rays of history converge in Sicily and that in the cellars of some luxurious baroque palaces, the Aleph could be hidden, the place which contains all other places, the story which contains all other stories.

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