Armando Verdiglione

In America, Enzo Nasso has become part of myth, legend and novels.
Not as a subject, who, faced with his own irony, would melt like snow in the sun.
Not exactly as a character(1), who would make masks unwearable and deception undecidable. Enzo Nasso arrived in America with the text of his life: with his poetry, novels and short stories, with his imaginary news stories and reports, his numerous short films and three major films.

He arrived in America with his own instance of quality. His elderly cousin, Julius Nasso, built many skyscrapers. Enzo Nasso has written and qualified a unique intellectual life. Franco Desideri, well-known in Italy in the 1950s as a very talented poet and highly regarded as a banker for the following forty years in America, has spoken to me of him with admiration, with the deepest respect and with inexhaustible enthusiasm. Annalisa Saccà, Franco Desideri's wife and a scholar of Nasso's text, has also spoken to me of him: she reads his text in an American university and invites other lecturers to do the same.

The artist Mimmo Rotella, one of his many fellow-travellers, has spoken to me of him as a great poet. I began reading his poems, and was deeply surprised and impressed. So I met him in Rome, where he lives, in the hall of the Protomoteca in Campidoglio, for the debate marking the twentieth anniversary of the publishing house Spirali.

He was accompanied by the noble jurist Domenico Marafioti. I encountered him several more times at a restaurant in Rome, either alone, or with his splendid and magnificent wife Eugenia; calm, intelligent, sober and discreet, her extraordinary beauty is perpetually confirmed by her years. A device for life, with Eugenia.
An intellectual device. A device for art and invention. Always in the direction of quality.

I met him at the Villa San Carlo Borromeo, during the conference Il Libro [The book] (27th - 29th November, 1998), then several times during the preparation of his marvellous exhibition. Anecdotes, short stories, paradoxes, parables, whims and riddles prevent any autobiographical note, any gratification, any coquetry in his narration, which, proceeding from irony always, is painted and written. An infinite narration. The infinity of narration. A self-portrait is impossible, because it is dissipated by irony and thwarted by solitude. Never in the fray. Never in the crowd or among the masses. Not even those that press for a place in the confraternities of the epoch. Is Enzo Nasso American? His father became an American. Or, at least, he acquired American citizenship. Is Enzo Nasso European? Mediterranean? Italian?

He is Italo-Calabrian, according to the tongue-in-cheek formula that he finds in his novel Buonasera buonasera [Good evenining, good evening]. Enzo Nasso is an intellectual. For him Calabria, Italy, the Mediterranean, Europe and America are unpassable regions of the sky and of the paradise of his word. An intellectual case.

Intellectual quality. With various devices for strength and direction. Including himself. When meeting someone, whether in public or in private, he resorts to a sort of fictio iuris: he appears to set himself a limit. But it is purely to put the other person at their ease, to instate a narrative device with them. A

nd certainty of oneself or of the other, with its superstitions, its ideology of envy and of the evil eye, its positive or negative fatalism, vanishes before the certification of the son, who proceeds from the father. Hence as the search is written, so it will lead to the law of the word and it's ethics.
The intellectual device, in which each of us finds his or her own status, draws things towards quality through talking, telling, doing and writing. For Enzo Nasso, a unique film director, much more than a player, and by no means a conjurer, the effects of quality, in other words truth and laughter, are as unrenounceable as they are unsignifiable. It is to them that his text, his life, in other words his word, is directed. Enzo Nasso finds himself in different and various statuses according to the narrative and scriptural devices that are instated: journalist, cartoonist, short story writer, painter, sculptor, film maker, novelist, artist, poet, promoter and sponsor of men and women of genius and teacher of great masters. But, each time and in each case, along his totally solitary and unique itinerary, Enzo Nasso is a writer.

A writer of experience. A writer of life. A writer of the experience of life, which is the original word. A writer of art and invention, of novels, cinema, theatre, painting, sculpture and narration. Each thing counts for what remains, for it to become writing. Each thing counts for that which is written and qualified of memory.

Through reading, the tip of writing. Enzo Nasso is a reader, because he is a writer of art and culture. He is close to avant-garde artists, writers, film makers, and playwrights. Within narrative devices. Yet he is also distant from them. Distance, like solitude, is the condition by which he draws the materials of the same avant-gardists towards writing and reading. Enzo Nasso should not be qualified as a novelist, artist, journalist, poet or film maker, but as a writer of novels, art, poetry, and journalism. An intellectual writer. An intellectual. Enzo Nasso makes an essential contribution to civilisation.

The fact that he has not joined or adhered to any of the congregations of omertà is certainly no reason for not consigning his text to the millennium just opening. Perhaps those who came to to listen to him at the Hotel Ambasciatori in Rome on the evening of 12th May, 1999, to mark the publication of the collection Poesie [Poems] and of the novel Buonasera buonasera [Good evening, good evening], realised this. It was an impressive turnout for someone who lives invisibly, and produces in solitude: six hundred managed to enter the big hall and more than one thousand two hundred were left outside the hotel.

Perhaps the scientists, poets, artists, writers, philosophers and psychoanalysts assembled for the conference L'Immunità [Immunity] (9th - 11th July, 1999) also realised it. They constantly stopped, enthusiastic, surprised and full of admiration, in front of his works of art, which seemed to make the solemn and age-old rooms of the Villa San Carlo Borromeo even more resplendent. Nasso's poems and novels arouse surprise.

But these works, besides constituting an event of enormous artistic and intellectual importance, make the miracle indelible. No sadness, no melancholy, no bitterness. Intellectual immunity. Immunity of time, of poetry, of narration, of the novel of works of art and culture. Enzo Nasso proceeds from doubt, from the way of two, of openness and of relation. Absolute doubt that does not found, form or structure any answer. Irony itself. The trace of the word. Without any fantastical or amphibological animals. Without any system of genealogical derivations.Without self-indulgence. Without emotion.
And even friendship is a device for contest, a device that is directed towards the absolute value, the cipher. Friendship itself becomes intellectual quality.
Doubt seems almost suspended when Enzo Nasso writes about others. This is in order to receive and understand their intellectual contribution.

Read Buonsera buonasera: each thing becomes part of the process of invention and art. Through the other language, through which stories-with their metaphors and their metonymies, their condensations and movements-are written. Through the different language, through which poetry, short stories, anecdotes, riddles, the political novel of the Mediterranean and of Europe, tales of Argentina and Australia, the imaginary news stories of Rome, Paris, Calabria and America-according to their necessities and with their abuses and their opportunities-are written and qualified.

No sentimentalism. No pathos. No nostalgia. Trace and memory. Writing of memory.

Like Calabria itself. And myth too. Because of his name. Nasso comes from far away. From an island to the mainland.
A metaphysical Calabria? Another logic. Another structure. Which is written. And remains.

Enzo Nasso's journey is logical, linguistic, poetic and intellectual. Enzo Nasso follows a process of abstraction that raises the parable until it is written.

Far from fashions and epochs. And through chance [l'azzardo]. Out of necessity, to do. War, contest. For chance [l'azzardo] nothing is impossible, probable, or even possible. Due to the contingent and to the catachresis in which it is instated, chance [l'azzardo] favours miracles, it favours what happens and what is done.
It is useful for what remains of what is done. With a utility pertaining to linguistic abuse. A pragmatic and narrative utility. Chance [l'azzardo] entrusts poetry with its arbitrary, indelibly artificial note. And the risk is certain. Without ado. And the bet is intellectual. No defeat. No annihilation.

The other is not where the father should be, nor vice versa. Victory belongs to the other. And it concludes in quality. Instead of finishing and signifying the contest. Read the works contained in this art book. Whatever memory this or that reproduction might recall is misleading.

These works are not art remembered, but art written and read. The enamels, the cuirassiers with their corresponding nonsense rhymes, the collages, decollages, portraits and sculptures: each thing is written as it proceeds from irony and its variant, satire. Then it finds how, through the signature and by means of the name itself, body and scene converge in the cipher, where symbol and letter cross. Beyond the fractal. Beyond the virtual.

Read each work with the title that the author ascribes to it: Carnality (1971), Cane Thicket, or Pretty Well (1974), Ius Primae Noctis (1980), Monument to Man (1980), Feminism (1980), Racism (1976). These are works that cannot be understood without irony.
Their writing, like the sublime writing of the miniature enamels, proceeds indeed from the way of openness, which is irony. Each work of art, by being written and qualified, is equivalent to the art, literature, science and philosophy of the planet.

Read Intrigue (1981): humour, witticisms, laughter. And invention. The fable becomes cipher. And: Doodles, Double Exposure, Paraiconography and Bush (1981).

Read Sing and You'll Feel Better (1981): from the fable to the cipher, proceeding from the cross between the guitar and the chair.

Read The Armed Virgin (1981): a parody of the discourse of death, and not only. Read Metafigures (1982): the figure is no longer allegorical and the masses no longer amorphous and inert, in abettance of all forms of tyranny.

Read Modesty (1985) as well, where the combination runs from witticism to riddle. Read the work entitled When the cuirassier undresses he no longer wants to be seen (1985): the Republic is not to be administered by domination.

And New Metaphysics (1985): a derision of the avant-garde movements and impossible metaphysics. Read Flowers for Eugenia (1986): splendour, nobility and magnificence accompany the combination, through devices for quality. And Pyramid (1995), Aspromonte (1998), Rochard's Blotches (1991) and Flowers for My 100-year-old Mother (1999). The series of cuirassiers with their nonsense rhymes also participate in Enzo Nasso's civil writing.

Leaving riddle, and with it enigma, where signification is impossible and enunciation cannot be consumed in what is enunciated. And even less in discourse.

The lesson of Leonardo da Vinci, of Niccolò Macchiavelli and Ludovico Ariosto, as well as those of Oscar Panizza and of Mediterranean and European memory, find a unique example in the sculptures.

Read The Working Class on All Fours Like Sheep in the Tunnel, 1992. Or The Political Class, Macaroni and Chit-Chat, of the same year. Or The Gangs and Gaggles: The Mothers of the Homeland, Susanna Agnelli, Tina Anselmi, Nilde Iotti.

We entrust Enzo Nasso's text to your reading. And once again to our own. It is by no means easy.

But it is simple.

And we are sure that, by reading it, you will become part of the device for what happens and of it's programme.

With unlimited pleasure. Enzo Nasso is the cipher of our paradise.

(1) [The word used by the author, personaggio, carries an affiliation with the Latin word persona, derived from the Etruscan word phersu, meaning "mask".]

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