In this remarkable debut, thirty-year-old self-taught artist Giuseppe Capitano exhibits a series of sculptures that express the enduring conflict between the spirit and the body. Each of the show’s six rooms holds only one or two pieces, set off by the historic palazzo’s vividly frescoed ceilings. An expressionless marble mask is draped with long natural hemp braids that dangle toward a flat steel gate representing a balcony. Perhaps meant to be Shakespeare’s Juliet, it has the austere rawness of an African ceremonial mask. A bodiless hemp foot suspended on a mirrored step—which seems to disappear through an optical illusion created by its reflection of the floor and the wall—evokes a liminal state between the physical and the ephemeral. In the next room, slender, rough-hewn hemp wings rest on a pristine white marble table supported by steel legs, all illuminated by a spotlight. The long frayed wingtips hang awkwardly over the sides of the table, throwing shadows on the tiled floor that convey a sense of movement and immediacy, as if they have just been taken from the body of Icarus. Elsewhere, there are giant hemp rats, snakes with steel tongues, a marble hand giving the “corno” (the Italian equivalent of the finger) to God. Capitano’s sculptures, with their sure-handed juxtapositions of natural and industrial materials, their allusions to ancient mythology and contemporary literature, are the stuff of dreams. Despite their confirmation of the impossibility of reconciliation between the physical and the spiritual, they elicit a sense of the subconscious integration of all things.
