"The Sacred Space"
Massimo Pastore and Teresa Cervo

curated by Antonio Maiorino Marrazzo

Exhibition: 8 – 24 February, 2019
Opening: Friday, 8 February, 7-10pm

Encounters always disclose unknowable variables, this is even more evident when the encounter is a flourishing struggle between permanent individualities who, in order to honor a specific shared commitment, must trespass each one in the field of the other and contaminate while retaining themselves. Identities are clothes, sometimes not comfortable, to put on and show off, not to set aside and keep safe.

Teresa Cervo and Massimo Pastore have lived this mutual measure, visiting the universe of the other, in a creation where one is never certain to distinguish a road that leads to the top from a descending slope. The curator, let me quote myself, in this case is a mere vector; but also a buggy has its modest relevance and proposing to Teresa Cervo to enter in that sacred space that had already partly been delimited by Massimo Pastore was a trial that could easily slash the harness and make the 'vehicle' unstable. But we have come to an end with a "rencontre" made of signs that do not end in their evidence (many could stop at those signs without knowing how to read them) and which will live secret paths in those who know how to accept their immediacy.

"The Sacred Space" (Lo Spazio Sacro) is such a vast extension that the only idea of building a balustrade to delimit it and make it resonate with the infinite (amazing paradox that only art grants) appears superhuman: but is not this what we do expect from artists? In their encounter, Teresa Cervo and Massimo Pastore, revealed to be seekers of silence, of space, of the night that is around the world, of the light that is around the heart. Both of them have suspended their installations: a verticality that, as any indefinitely extended line, meets the celestial sphere in the two points of acme, the zenith and the nadir. Thirty-two stairways in paper, iron, empty space, light to go through and spying your own shadow on the walls, becoming giants for a moment; seven photographic images in the form of kakemono (specific Japanese way of organizing an image in the shape of a scroll intended to be affixed vertically) that make the man bearer of that same line that meets the celestial sphere, which connects only seemingly distant worlds.

If in the works composing Pastore’s implant pervades a metaphysical process that is effectively fixed in "Sintesi 39" that recomposes the hour before sunrise and the last hour before sunset, Teresa Cervo produces in the connection structure, decidedly physical, representing all meanings that stairway possesses: of representation, of reduction, of parameter, but not of access to a defined place (transcendence of the utopia). In Pastore's kakemono there is the immanent way indicating that of transcendence (probably of emptiness) and in the artist's decision to organize images in this form, I verify the visual impermanence of the work itself in its possibility of being rolled up to become ephemeral.

"The Sacred Space" (Lo Spazio Sacro) is an ongoing dialogue that Pastore and Cervo started by finding an art to benefit people so that their sensations and actions are multiplied in number and vigor.

(Text: Antonio Maiorino Marrazzo, curator)