ALESSIO DELFINO – TAROTS
30.10 – 27.11.2016
Playing cards is something that suits everyone, a practice that successfully moves minds. A custom that consolidates or destroys social relations and reveals the characters of human comedy. It’s the chosen territory of learning cunning and the exercise of memory from an early age.
Questioning the cards, on the contrary, does not pertain to the player in search of recreation but is serious matter, destined for that particular craftsman who aspires to look out at the threshold of the initiatory path. You play cards to pass the time and you play cards to invite time not to pass.
A biographical reference. When Alessio Delfino discovers the Tarot he is little more than a teenager. Attracted by the window of a singular shop, he buys a volume with the illustrations of the triumphs, the Marseille cards that correspond substantially to today’s major arcana. From that moment he learned to cultivate a relationship with these characters, a dialogue in life and in photography, becoming among other things a recognized expert and often invited to give lectures on the subject. Why Tarots? Delfino frequents Paris assiduously, is married to a French woman and observes the seraphic continent from above his dual nationality.
Although, as he explains himself, the origin of these figures can be found in the Middle East, and has had fundamental passages through North Africa (Egyptian track) and the Hebrew Kabbalah (22 arcana such as the letters of the alphabet and the probable etyme torah)He feels and treats the Tarot cards as French, because it is in France that the major personalities of this discipline confront each other in a lively and stimulating way.
The large prints of Delfino’s works arouse wonder for the choice of materials, models, poses, while the staging tends in some way to be traditional. The whole is not obscured by the photographic technique that is a wise expression and that adds a testimony about the impulses and tensions of the medium tout-court, mirror of generations of photographers and their fetishes, their abandonment. He personally loves to build his sets, infusing them with a neoclassical light and a pictorial approach aimed at returning a certain aura of unreality. In this context the unveiling of the bodies is a direct door on the feminine. The connection to a circular universe that unmasks all the inadequacy of the straight line. An exhortation to recover the favours of circularity and union with the Spirit. The artist is the Bagatto, the first tarot card, the novice, the magician, the child of wisdom who welcomes initiation as a necessary burden to belong to the secret world of adults. Is the ability to bring forth the pill of future that dwells within him wisdom or divination? Experience can only be considered divination as a paradox. And that is, when the acceptance of arbitrariness is established as a ductile element of knowledge of the Self. The exposure to the figures, which are endowed with meaning at the very moment in which they appear, are the result of randomness so impenetrable from opinion sometimes moved by something else. In reality, all possible existences coexist in every existence, like silent applications, like hawks, like ferrets, like sliding doors momentarily stranded from which to observe the inside and the outside of every scene, of every choice. An important bet that cannot fail. A pool ticket marked exclusively with triples. This is how divination and wisdom experience find themselves at a common point. The illusory veil paraded with an elegant cover, which leaves the breast exposed to the metamorphoses of the possible. Formal goals to strive for, the knowledge that passes through the constantly changing body.
Fabio Vito Lacertosa