My dear Luciana,

Finally, after so many years, we have had the chance of meeting again. Above all, I have had the chance and the pleasure of once again seeing an extensive selection of twenty years of your artistic production (this is the number of years that covers our friendship, do you remember?) and of getting to know your most recent works in person. It is these which have led me to a series of reflections that I want to express by way of this letter.

I remember that in the Autumn of 1969, in presenting you in an exhibition held in Taranto, I commented your abstract-matteric works carried out with torn, seething and clotted plastic materials seeing in them "that sense of spiritual consternation, of anxiety, which according to the most recent existentialism lies at the centre of the problem of our destiny". I then expressed the same concepts in the Spring of the following year in the catalogue of the Miami exhibition looking "behind the burnt cleavings - like rents of the earth's crust from which lava seems to flow and as tortured wounds of the skin - or behind the figurative structures of a spatial objectivity or fantastic realities of abysses".

After having seen your recent production I wanted to reread those texts. Are they perhaps obsolete? I don't think so. Obviously dated, yes, but not superseded. This is because I see that the two basic elements I had individuated in your need for expression still remain alive today and in some way constitute the peculiar features of your artistic personality. One of these is anguish which is a sort of alarmed and suffered answer by the individual to the recognition of the nullity of his/her finite being. Well, anguish is a feeling based upon an energy lying entirely within the Ego and which burrows and consumes it (in the same way your plastic materials were dug out and burnt, translated in pictorial and plastic language). Today I refind that same quantity of energy in your new works. It has certainly changed in both quality and substance in the sense that it is no longer "incarnated" in disquieting anxiety but, on the contrary, has moved on into its opposite, I would say. In other words, into a positive activism which now does not look inside the bowels of the earth but rises in the direction of the endless dimension of the sky.

Another element is this even stubborn will to move "beyond", to go beyond the screens of appearance, to at all costs - and also spasmodically - try to possess the essence: 'yesterday' it was expressed by the anxious attitude/approach of thoroughly penetrating the most intimate structures of the matter. Today it is manifested by the desire to cross confines in order to be immersed within the boundlessness of the infinite. I believe that this will is dictated by that portion of the infinite which we have in ourselves and which desires the immense Infinite that lies over us: in the words of the philosopher Karl Jaspers, from the need of recognizing the total being in our being because we aspire to the Absolute, we have an idea of it and try to reach it in continuously shifting the horizon. Your linguistic and thematic variations therefore constitute Jasper's "shifting of the horizon", always searching for the same objective: that is, for the Infinite and for the Absolute which is other than you but also inside you.

I said above that your most recent works, both pictorial and plastic, interest me considerably because they intrigue me, they question and provoke me and consequently possess that interrogative and neutral quid that goes to make up the mysterious quality of art.

In persisting with that pressing need to penetrate the infinite dimension your paintings appear as being like portions of the universe, as fragments of that harmonic symphony of interminable surfaces which are the sidereal spaces where lines, points, ellipses and clots of expanded chromatic matter 'chase' each other, immersed in silence. Or else as tongues of coastal land or islands carefully placed on oceans and all seen from above, from a great height, where the geometry of the world shows itself by way of delicate and stupendous 'writings'. In either case, your point of view always proves to be within the aerial perspective of the infinite and it is by "shifting the horizon" - that is, looking once above and once beneath you - that you visually enter celestial immensity or with your eye glide over the underlying strips of land. Although you always inhabit the sky, that eternal 'hierophany' which is what lies over the earth, there where mankind's need for the infinite sets transcendence. Let's remember the testimony by that African of the Ewe Tribe as referred by Mircea Eliade: "Where there is the Sky there is also God".

Dear Luciana, with your inexhaustible imagination you have ventured into the higher regions that are inaccessible to man, into those sidereal zones - home of the gods - where the divine suggestions of the transcendent abide, of absolute reality and of the perennial. Where time neither passes nor has other rhythms. Where clamours do not arrive but where it is possible, however, to perceive the marvellous and profound sounds of which silence is rich. You have passed the frontiers of the sky, that is, of the category of the "high" which you have entered in virtue of the inexorable force of imagination. And now, from above, you look at and paint those other hierophanies which are the lands that have emerged. Or else you look at, and pictorially narrate, the divine traces represented by the celestial wonders.

And given the fact that I mentioned 'writings' which you draw from the aerial visions of the underlying lands, or from the sign combinations with which the heavenly geometries are ordered and are disassembled... this is how I arrive at the deduction that your interest for the sign is an ancient one (in the sense that it has always formed part of you). In fact, and thinking again about them, your informal works pulsed with creative matter, it's true, but tangles of signs forming wefts and woofs played on their matteric surfaces. As was true, moreover, in the series of the "Cathedrals", and then in those of the "Spatial Journeys", the "Cosmic Forests", etc.

I want to say that the sign has always been a distinctive feature of your lexicon in such a way that you have always combined the matteric prospect of informal language with that of the language of the sign. And today you have returned to the magic of the sign, using it as a splendid linear play - continuous or segmented, long or in a tiny fragment - which designs the geometries of the lands seen from the sky or else the points and lines of the endless surfaces of Uranus.

And then coming to form part of the sign universe - with a very strong suggestive charge - one has that system of combined signs which is the writing you have used with a rare sense of taste in many works of past years and which you reuse today in the form of the Hebrew alphabet: prodigious and arcane characters that refer to the mysteries and magic of the Kabala, the wisdom of the ancient sapiential texts, the sacredness of the prophetic messages. Characters - or letters - charged with archaic meanings, symbols of history and also hierophanies in their being the communicative instruments of the "chosen people".

The signs-characters of the Hebrew alphabet also mark your sculptures, above all the steles and totems, which in moving upwards - emblem of an anxiousness for communication and communion with the Sky - in the heavenly sphere 'transport' the sign course of man's language: perhaps his prayers or else the story of his merits and guilt, his virtues and mistakes, his being an angel and a devil, Gabriel and Lucifer, Dionysus and Titan.

Furthermore, the theme of the tree is a dominant one in your sculptures. How much one could say, symbolically, regarding this fundamental archetype and its sacred importance: the tree - combined with stone and the altar - as microcosm of the most ancient strata of religiosity; as image of the cosmos; as cosmic theophany; as the symbol of life and inexhaustible fecundity; as axis mundi and support of the universe; as symbol of resurrection and regeneration; and as the mystical relation with mankind. The tree as a further hierophany, consequently, and therefore as sublime aspiration to the high and other transcendence (and it is on the tree that the stele and the totem are modelled as the element of conjunction which from the earth leads to the sky, a strongly 'hierogamic' symbol).

My dear Luciana, and let me repeat it, your most recent works have really impressed me because with evident philological clarity they amalgamate with your previous linguistic experiences (notwithstanding the "shifting of the horizon"). And in my opinion this is because they mark a moment of intense expressive maturity. Because with the wonderful "Athletes of the Spirit", the steles, totems and the bronze trees they drive you on into a fascinating and thrilling dimension of the infinite which is the real dimension of art, the reign of the paradox in which one also happily lives when trials and anguish torture one's body and where the spirit also sings when one's eyes drop tears and the heart is broken.

Armando Ginesi
September 1989