THE MEDITERRANEAN ICON

by Armando Verdiglione

One fine Easter morning, you arive in Naples. You admire the Gulf, the hill, the mountain. You gaze at the sea, the horizon, the light. You visit the Castel dell'Ovo, the Maschio Angioino. Then you go into Palazzo Reale: corridors, stairs, rooms, ceilings. Have you really studied everything already? Then look very closely, examine, leaf through and read each work. Hazard, meeting, risk.

Something is beginning. Something is starting out. For each work the interlocutor establishes itself. Memory writes itself. And you find what is to come for you here and now. Orality is the other way of writing. The arts and the inventions of the sky and of paradise are summoned to write themselves.

And what you see, you hear: it comes and goes, communicating from afar. Metrics is the pioneer of the arithmetic of the voyage of qualification. The epochs disappear, in the eternity of each work you read. The museum is the film of civilization: the text arrives at the cipher. This acquisition of the classic is the message, which concludes your saga with the extreme test of truth and laughter, effective truth and laughter. There is no need to interpret, to comment or decipher anything: the museum offers the ciphering of your life.

You come out of Palazzo Reale and arrive at Capodimonte: the hill, the garden, the children, the young couples, the intellectual tourism of humanity. You enter the various and different halls of the monument: other works, other evidence of what is to come, unexpectedly, other writings on the walls, the floors, the ceilings. Walk, go through, look: each detail, the punctuation, the portrait of your voyage.

The spacing has no boundaries or limits: from the trace as a mode of two, originary to the mode of anatomy in the videomatics of the semblance, and to the mode of time in the battery of satisaction and of intellectual profit.

And there is no more tiredness: the intellectual question proves inescapable. And there is no more sadness: what is dispositive of the revolution of the word is dispositive of merriment, of strength. And never more do you go astray: the museum concludes your voyage, your demand is intellectual, you do not lose the direction.

Ground floor, first floor, second floor. Maybe third floor? The plane, the linear and the circular are no more: Capodimonte inscribes itself in your intellectual navigation. And, in the evening, you find yourself on your terrace again, listening to something that is neither near nor far. And you find these strips of sky, early in the morning. The morning of the Angel.

The encounter with Ferdinando Ambrosino cannot be historicized. Each appointment is the condition of something new that is dispositive, which turns towards the absolute newness of his entire work. You cross the street of monuments, of houses, of what will remain of memory.

You become aware of your mission. And nothing is worth anything in and of itself. Each thing of intellectuality is drawn towards absolute value. And an absolute value is friendship with Ferdinando Ambrosino, with his family, with his work. The villages, the sea and the hill: you return to Bacoli again, where you always were with Ferdiando Ambrosino and where you cannot correctly say that you have ever been.

Immemorial landscape. Landscape as portrait and as writing. Landscape as quality of your life. Cuma, Greece, Rome. The Mediterranean: from the Phoenicians to the Hebrews, to the Christians. Europe, which is worth the eternity of the galaxies in each instant of the work of Ferdinando Ambrosino. The trace of your life, the family, the land. From the oracle to the enigma of hospitality and of diplomacy. Until the intellectual advantage of the Pentecost. With no more Apocalypse. No more hiding. No more secrets. Until pleasure. Until the berth at quality.

And you realise that Ferdinando Ambrosino has drawn the essential of his family, and also of history and of enterprise, towards intellectual health, towards the instance of cipher. The Sibyl's cave, Plato's cavern, Leonardo's den: there is no more Polyphemus, no more Monophemus, Odysseus is quite another voyager now, quite another messenger. He follows after Oedipus, after Christ, after Dante. Ferdinando Ambrosino also proves to be the signature and the intellectual quality of his work. Naples, Venezuela, the United States. And again: Paris, Geneva, St. Petersburg. And definitely: Tokyo, Venice, Beijing.

The voyage comes from Jerusalem. From the question of nomination. Ferdinando Ambrosino narrates, recounts: the gestural is the digital, with which originary experience writes itself.

The earth is not a place. And the voyage is also without a place. “Art must be felt. It must express what is felt”.

The figure confirms the figureless as much as the unfigurable. And form, always other, points to the non-representational and the unrepresentable. That which figures itself forms itself, draws itself, comes to write itself. And, with Ferdinando Ambrosino, you enter something specifically dispositive of communication. “The values of my life are the values of my painting”.

Which painting? Which writing? Which life? You go into Ferdinando Ambrosino's house and into his studio. What withdraws from the voyage? The floor, the frame, the wall, the beam, the ceramics, the mosaic, the container, the tools, the window, the door, the gateway, the railing, the balcony, the gulf, the fish, the wine, the food: nothing at all eludes intellectuality.

A work, another, and another: what you have seen, heard, listened to in the Palazzo Reale, in Capodimonte, among the houses, the monuments, the streets of Naples or along the seashore, the waves of your life, the waves of light, the waves of the arts and inventions, the waves of painting as constant and incessant writing, all this you read. Now. This is Ferdinando Ambrosino's museum. His museum. Your museum. Your film.

And the icon is not the same any more. It is no longer the byzantine icon. It is no longer Rublev's icon, revolutionary and modern though it is. Is Ferdinando Ambrosino's the icon of Naples? The icon of the planetary city? Of the Mediterranean? Of Europe? Of civilization? Ferdinando Ambrosino's icon is the capital of originary life. Of your life. So, each work participates in this iconography. Each work is this icon.

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