|
(text by Enzo
Santese)
The formative
and operative path followed by Alessandro Cadamuro is highly articulated
for the multiple factors involved in it.
The intermediary element in this variety of components: The Glass,
acting as common divisor, becomes the main element in his expression.
Considering his venetian origin and his "growth" in
academic as well as non-academic environments, the choice of this
material does not seem to be casual. On the contrary a direct
consequence of the influence of the lagoonal town and his father
Ennio, linked to the glass background of Murano.
It is in childish games that Alessandro, among heaps of glass
waste, sedimento of multiple fusions in the Murano furnaces, looks
for the "Precious Stones", to reassemble a hypothetical
treasure, uplifting the so called "discarded" to the
supreme essence of glass preciousness.
And while living amidst glass masses and grey-green waters CAdamuro
founds his first "Glass-chanter" manifesto in 1980:
his poetic statement, the synthesis of what his aesthetic and
content expression will be, the unmistakeble course of his artistic
production. In the same year he conceived and produced a series
of "musical instruments": a sort of sonic glass sculpture
which he names "Glass-phono", "Glass-breaker",
"Glass-chanter", "Drum-glasses", followed
by "For a sonic Glass Poem", unto the recent ones "The
Glass-wind", "The Glass-grinder", "Glass-water"
and "Glass-sound".
The term "POEGLASSES" (POEVETRI) that he coined to identify
his works - from the written verse to his poetic visual-concrete
and sonic creations - owes its genesis to a gesture: originally,
Alessandro Cadamuro would scratch his linear poems with a diamond
point on the surface of a "glass page", vertically sustained
by two metal supports. The performance of these "Glass-scriptures"
(glass-performances) was accompanied by the vibrations of his
Glass-instruments interpreted by percussionists and the acute
voice of a soprano singing the texts after they were engraved
on the "Glass-sheet" with "resounding" and
sharp movements together with the miriade of scratched, carved,
intertwined, overlapped signs. The sound of the engraving, of
the scratching on the "Glass-sheet", was amplified by
audio-magnetic heads placed between the glass layers, and the
harsh and dry vibrations originated from the pressure of the diamond
point would spring right from the core of the glass, spreading
around their sharp and powerful scratching sound.
He marks, engraves, breaks up, disassembles the linear structure
of glass, remoulding it into new forms, connecting it to other
materials, enriching it with his own poetic fragments and the
poetics itself. The letters or part of letters of the glass surfaces
are unique, often overlapping and/or isolated one from the other
as signs, segments of a whole act of composing. The work is therefore
for Cadamuro an uncontainable expressive explosion, which cannot
limit the creative erruption, the final emotion, by privileging
one language in despite of another.
It is in this context, first in Venice and the in the rest of
Italy and abroad, that the performance becomes for Cadamuro a
sophisticated expressive means, multiform clot of meanings, situations
and heterogenious materials, the chatacterizing and distinctive
element of his artistic research.
He associates glass, the basic matter, and the actions on and
with glass to other materials, whose transparency is more or less
evidently aknowledged: plexiglass, plastic, rubber, nylon, resins,
silicone products etc. And furthermore: incandescent light spots,
pre-formed or by the artist himself designed neons, electromechanical
and electronic elements, electroacoustic sound diffusers connected
to pre-recorded close circuit audio and video tapes etc.;
NEXT
|
|