Tarots
by Diletta Benedetto
With Tarots, Alessio Delfino’s reflection on the ancestral symbolism linked to the sacred feminine, which permeates the work carried out in recent years, takes on an additional value. The cosmogonic discourse behind the search for the origins of the mother goddess, declined in its different qualities to compose a real pantheon of female deities, now reveals its deep sense, the link with a third element which had not been fully interpreted. In the compositional vision of each of the six major arcana of the tarot, inspired by the Marseille tradition, that Delfino has so far built, without haste, in this open artistic project, which makes the passage of time a constitutive element of the very meaning of its becoming, the feminine, the origin of life and the highest expression of the very meaning of earthly existence, or the path of access to the successive phases of knowledge, intertwine in an irreversible chemistry, just like in an alchemical formula. The journey that symbolically undertakes the Bagatto, card number zero, through the path that will take him from initiation, through a phase of purification and one of enlightenment, to the final reintegration, to reach at the end a new cognitive and spiritual status, that will make him free: crazy in the eyes of most, can represent the journey that the artist himself makes through his own path of awareness. And that returns a work that seems to want to contain everything, almost as for Jorge Borges in his Aleph. An Opera Omnia, an Aleph precisely, which contains in itself the symbolism of the beginning and the end, which alternate and chase each other; with a strong reference to the Comedy of that Dante Alighieri who by chance or perhaps not begins to write his Opera Omnia right in the same “Middle of the path of our life”, in which the Savonese artist is to undertake his journey through Tarots. But there is an element that, among all, disambiguates the initial feeling of having a perfect work in front, which almost prevents any other interpretation than that already meticulously composed by its wise director. In the flawless aesthetics of each of Delfino’s photographs, in fact, the true level of esoteric access, hidden to most, can consist only in tracing a space of interpolation, a white space composed within a full and visitable aesthetic scheme, according to strict mystery discipline, only after having full access to the previous hermeneutic level. On this level, the viewer who has won an adequate entrance key can finally attach a meaning to the interweaving of meanings delivered by Alessio Delfino. Only in this way can the artist try to conquer a new level of knowledge and, like the mad, the tarot number zero, symbol of rebirth at the end of the deck, start over.
Il mito, la bellezza femminile, la perfezione formale.
by Anna Saba Didonato
Photography abdicates its original nature as a means of reproduction of reality, to build iconic architectures in which they inhabit the myth and formal perfection and in which you breathe an atmosphere magically suspended, crystallized in a timeless dimension with a decadent aftertaste. Refined photographer, Alessio Delfino composes, scrupulously and in accordance with the dictates of the sources, the settings in which the subjects are portrayed, referring to other places, to other dimensions, inviting us to cross the threshold of mystery and the supernatural.
The Tarots series, dedicated to the twenty-two major arcana of the Marseille Tarot, is represented here in the first six shots depicting the Moon, the Empress, the Devil, the Sun, the Star and Death, elegant and complex allegorical representations in which the classical iconography is wisely sublimated both by the aesthetic conception and by the neo-baroque style of the artist. The thematic choice is a spontaneous emanation of the esoteric interests of Delfino who, with the representation of the tarot deck as an initiatory path towards knowledge and in which the female figure plays a strategic symbolic role, reveals what are the guidelines of his personal research: the sacredness of the eternal feminine and the centrality of women in a conception of the world understood as “great representation” and “of life as a path of subjection, more or less voluntary and conscious, to the power of the symbolic”.
