GIORGIO SOREL

"I stand as witness

of common fate,

Isurvived that time and that place"

ANNA ACHMATOVA

 

The artist as a demiurge, a remaker, at the end of each story, with fine, shapeless, indistinct sand of presences and evocations through discreet, suggestive metamorphoses, almost apparitions caught in a second and fixed on the film of conscience in an eternal, ambiguous oscillation between disappereance and trasformation, between abstraction and readable image. Giorgio Sorel is a master of metamorphosis, an alchemist who alludes rather than tell and hints at something else in a liquidness of memories, in gaseous atmospheres, in backgrounds that are screens and projections of a fermentation in progress, mysterious, continuous, from which faces appear and images are generated that have the incorporeal evidence and the insubstantial solidity of dreams. The sand of the beaches of the worlds tha Sorel uses, and that he fixes on the canvas "like an automaton" - as he declares - is the extreme product of a trasformation, of a slow and obscure metamorphosis that has cancelled mountains, pulverised rocks, fragmented minerals and wreckage, beyond any other life, any further event: pure and purifyng, anonymous and multiple, reminiscent of water and fire of which it preserves the liquidness and the abrasive power, easy to penetrate and plastic, maternal uterus for shapes that adhere to it and that it wraps up, and yet, as it is the case with Sorel's work, capable of regenaration, of further transformation. Sand as primordial matter of creation: it is not by chance that faces without thickness, without solidity originate from him. The most fragmented, crushed, pulverised matter becomes, out of visual and dream - like alchemy. a face, a body, evidence of time and history, without penetrating into metaphysics or getting lost in the forest of symbolism, mixing and mixing again matter, transforming it without escaping from it or making it something else, without dissipating it into the ambiguity of the subjective.

 

"Matter is my objective,

which is dignity of man,

caught in grey and in crude black.

Dust that becomes, under your hand, 

an embroidery or a face".

 

So writes Sorel. And from matter it is a materialization, litteraly, of faces, emotions, human expressions, sensations that rise as kneaded in matter itself, imprints of motions of the soul, passionate apparitions full of sensations.

In the language of art Sorel creates paroles that are words that are hard and precise, square and gentle, flakes and fragments, bits of a reflection between secret planes that make traces of the human appear in a spatiality without cardinal points, in an eternally suspended time, frozen in a present infinity. It takes ages to make the frail canvas that sand, metals, resins, wax melting and pigments, that have consolidated and trasformed, become dust again, in an inert silence far from man and his sight, which now surprises and humanises these shapes, giving them a soul. Sorel's art is an art of estrangement, of alterity and extraneousness that only our eye, through emotions, can cause to vibrate with empathy, cross-references, allusions and assonances. It is an art of memory and remembrance, which conjures and evokes, and is therefore all the more incisive and dramatic, even more tense than simple figuration, than realism, than acrobatic abstraction that risks becoming sickly - sweet decorativeness. It is an art of silence, of meditation, in which emptiness dilates and at the same time clots in ectoplasms whose traces are impressed with emtions, events, stories that are so full and implacable that one can hear their voiceless scream, recognise their stigmata, their wounds, witness of a total, existential ordeal, shroud of unresolved transitions. Therefore, Sorel's art is firstly testimony. Sorel is not a visionary. he does not express a hallucinated world, he is not a necromancer of reality, he is a clear - eyed, curt witness who looks and participates in all his being, in the completeness of his humanity that is made of reason and empathy; he testifies to all he has seen and so perpetuates it in time, beyond vision, almost making it forever present. And there is a sort of urgency in witnessing, the retention of the image, no matter how deformed and unstable, ready to be reabsorbed into the magma of the shapeless, gaseous and liquid emptiness all arund. Though it may appear "per speculum in aenigmate", like in a mirror, it retains so much emotion that it still can involve and upset.

"The need to tell the 'others', to make the 'others' aware" - Primo Levi wrote in If this is a man - "had become for us, before and after the liberation, an immediate and violent impulse, so much so that it competed with the other basic needs".

And it is inevitable for Sorel to tell the Shoah, the horrible, unspeakable tragedy of the annihilation of a people, the immeasurable tragedy that seems to sum up all the others, subsume every holocaust. And the "circle" that encompasses it is that closed shape that prevents thought from getting away from it, that makes memory compulsive and the need to bear witness urgent, undelayable, beyond any particular, any clarification, any trivial detail, to collect the traces of faces turned into ash, their screaming, their suffering forever floating on quartz sand, in an existential synthesis that art makes objective and more present than history and the documents that the tortures tried to delete.

Thus, Sorel becomes "the moral witness" whose figure is masterfully described by Avishai Margalit in L'etica della Memoria (The ethics of memory), il Mulino, Bologna, 2006, that writes: "The moral witness has the special assingment to unveil the evil he gets in touch with".

Giorgio Sorel's art has the property of making him a "moral witness". and the empathy that he shows toward all suffering, saving it from indifference and indistinctness, and restoring them to our present, our very gazing and partecipating, makes him not only, in the Latin way, a "testis", but also a "superstes" - the survivor -, originally a synonym of witness.

 

 

 

Marzio Dall'Acqua

President of the Academy of Fine Arts of Parma