At Palazzo Scammacca del Murgo, after the stops in Caltagirone and Scicli, the exhibition “Ateliers revealed. Photo reportage by Antonio Vacirca” arrives, curated by Giuseppe Cona and promoted by Scalamatrice 33. Giovanni Blanco, Maria Buemi, Carmelo Candiano, Giovanni La Cognata, Giuseppe Puglisi and Piero Zuccaro are the six Sicilian artists told through the photographs of their studios, thanks to the shots of a photography professional like Antonio Vacirca, born in 1972, Sicilian, with a solid and important international experience in the field of portraiture and travel reportage, on a social and anthropological level.

From left to right: Antonio Vacirca, photo portrait of Giovanni Blanco, 2024; Giovanni Blanco, “Scimmia Pittore”, 1995-2021, oil on palette, ph. courtesy the artist and Palazzo Scammacca del Murgo, Catania

The central idea of ​​this exhibition is contained in the intention to make known the intimate places of artistic creation in order to dissect them, with due caution, and show what remains far from the spotlight: the Ithaca of each artist, the refuge and metamorphosis of thought translated into pictorial vision or drawing. As Cona underlined, this exhibition is «an exciting journey into the world of contemporary art that, through the photographic medium, allows us to enter the ateliers and learn the secrets and intimate impulses of the six special artists who have granted our request to know them more intimately». Each one has a sense of urgency and expectation, but also the order of its own space with easels, technical tools and objects scattered or, on the contrary, arranged with precision. Also silence appears, in a soft and decisive photographic black and white, which fills every nook and cranny and all the surfaces of the work spaces.

From left to right: Antonio Vacirca, photo portrait of Maria Buemi, 2024; Maria Buemi, “In altri luoghi #11”, 2023, pencil on paper, ph. courtesy the artist and Palazzo Scammacca del Murgo, Catania

Thus, in the recently restored rooms of Palazzo Murgo, a story is told of images of ateliers that welcome, preserve and bear witness to the unfolding of the creative process. Furthermore, the photographs are also accompanied by six works – one for each artist – in which we can find a reflection on the sky, on old age and on the Earth’s gravity that does not intimidate the vigor of a “Still Life with Strelitzias” like the painting by Carmelo Candiano. If Adorno maintained that «art is magic freed from the lie of being truth», each atelier in this exhibition is a glimmer of light that shifts attention to the magical secrecy of the gesture of these six artists. In fact, as Pippo Pappalardo, who edited the exhibition catalogue, stated, «this photographic document has become a source of emotion, the cause of different expressions, and today it is here alongside the paintings to speak in a different language not of “a fleeting moment”, but of a laboratory of ideas». This exhibition is full of ideas, concepts, eyes and faces, in which you can also recognize the face of Franco Battiato, in a photo that tells the story of Piero Zuccaro’s space, who together with the famous painter from Catania Giuseppe Puglisi – professor of painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Catania – was a friend of the Battiato.

From left to right: Antonio Vacirca, photo portrait of Carmelo Candiano, 2024: Carmelo Candiano, “Still life strelitzia”, 2022, oil on panel, ph. courtesy the artist and Palazzo Scammacca del Murgo, Catania

These photographic documents reveal sensorial and intimate dimensions without revealing that part of mystery that surrounds every creative act, from which even the pictorial image of a “Painter Monkey” emerges, as in the work of Giovanni Blanco. The same mysterious perception unites both the sibylline drawing on paper by Maria Buemi – entitled “In altri luoghi #11” – and the painting by Giuseppe Puglisi “Cielo d’Estate, Traslazione”. Not only, therefore, the intent to reveal part of a certain idea of ​​contemporary art, but also that of creating a narrative that does not intend to shock and provoke, but to bear witness, tell, create a visual archive. And it is, often, what is missing in the directions of the art of our time.

Info:

Ateliers revealed. Photo reportage by Antonio Vacirca
22/03 – 13/04/2025
Palazzo Scammacca del Murgo
Piazza Scammacca 1, Catania
www.palazzoscammacca.it

Nilla Zaira D'Urso

Through art she feels the need to get closer to nature, deciding to create an artistic residence on Etna as a “refuge for contemporary art” for artists and scholars. Thus was born Nake artistic residence. She won the Responsible Etna Award 2015. In 2017, she was invited to the Sala Zuccari, Senate of the Republic, as an art critic. She writes for Italian and foreign artists. Curator of the first Museum of Contemporary Art of Etna and of the “Contemporary Etna” project.