THE SACRED ENTER WHERE IT IS ALLOWED

Painting is like God: every time it is declared dead, it always returns, often in a different form. “God” here certainly does not refer to the Christian one, or rather not only, just as Nietzsche did not mean the Christian God when he proclaimed His death. “God” is instead the most immediate way to identify the object of our deeply human tension toward the beyond, the metaphysical. But it is also the primordial solution to the incomprehensible or the unbearable. A concept that is decidedly vintage, and yet for this very reason eternally recurrent. After all, as Susan Sontag wrote, “each era must reinvent the project of spirituality for itself.”
Artists Filippo Cegani and Riccardo Di Caro take on this burden. And they do so precisely through painting, a privileged medium for conveying the spiritual for many reasons, first and foremost its bidimensionality: far from being a limitation, it allows painting to ignore the physical laws that confine other disciplines to our plane of reality, thus enabling it to move one degree closer to everything that has no dimension. It is at this table, the overlap between the investigation of painting and that of spirituality, that the works of Cegani and Di Caro negotiate their position, despite their numerous and evident formal differences. Beginning with technique: strongly graduated and blended in the former’s work, inexorably superflat in the latter’s, albeit with some reciprocal contamination. But it is precisely the contrasts that highlight the rhymes, and it is the distances that allow the weaving of threads whose interlacing reveals patterns otherwise invisible.
Filippo Cegani’s practice (Milan, 1993) draws on a profoundly Western repertoire, oscillating between the classical and the Catholic, omnipresent in these new canvases, though in a less explicit way than in the past. There are no more saints, no more Madonnas: the protagonists are subjects that renew the ancient theme of the *memento mori*. A medieval helmet that, where not yet corroded by rust, reflects a funeral procession (could it be that of its own owner?). The amber-like face of an Artemis, goddess of the hunt and symbol par excellence of nature’s wildness, its inappropriability and virginity, lets the shadow of a skull show through. An ancient oxidized mask watches us from behind a carved panel depicting scenes of dance. A watering can becomes a vase for a severed sunflower, destined to droop further and further. A skeleton, also rusted, is caught in a praying position beneath a transparent, finely embroidered veil. Cegani’s use of the macabre is anything but ornamental: the inevitability of death is the first and ultimate reason for the necessity of the sacred, for the relationship with a beyond capable of exorcizing the finitude of our lives.
The painter therefore chooses to show the fragility of our illusions: armor and even bones cannot escape rust; veils do not conceal but intensify; statues and deities are reminders of the ultimate fate of everything we build, materially and spiritually.
If Cegani’s works remind us that we all must die, those of Riccardo Di Caro (Milan, 1999) emphasize that first we must live. Death is not denied, but included within a spirituality more immanent than metaphysical, more process-based than final, in a word more Eastern. Eastern, too, is the visual repertoire he draws from: characters taken from anime, selected not for their recognizability but for their openness to reinterpretation. In his surgical paintings, Di Caro rewrites, overlaps, and juxtaposes fragments of different origins to compose narrative worlds captured at the moment of their unfolding, forever suspended, without any hope of resolution. The drop of blood will never stain the bristles of the brush spreading sauce on the onigiri; it will remain forever on the verge of doing so. The fading memory of a lost kitten is in fact far more real than those flowers, beautiful yet cumbersome. The seven selves (plus one) live, struggle, and die in the same instant: a loop of existences and dispositions that find no escape except in their reciprocal overlap and understanding. No matter how clear the sky, no matter how many butterflies flutter around it, that face remains in shadow: a choice, or a constraint? Di Caro’s is a painting of oppositions and battles, above all between states of being: presence and distraction, central themes in more than one work, are the focal points upon which the painter traces not a circle but the ellipse of life. An orbit irreducible to a single trajectory and always drawn toward multiple gravitational centers, even conflicting ones. What Di Caro seems to tell us is that it is up to us to stay on course.
It is impossible to flatten spirituality solely onto death or solely onto life: it is precisely by virtue of their mutual necessity that we discover how God must be sought in between them, in the interstitial space that both contains and separates them. The works of Cegani and Di Caro, so deeply painterly and therefore so intimately directed toward the spirit, are narratives without beginning or closure: behind them and ahead of them lies the same eternity that characterizes both painting and the most secular need for God.

Text by Alberto Villa