initalia
This was written by an Italian journalist about my first show in Rome, Ti Amo Italia, at Icipici Studio, via Giulia 96, in the summer of 2008:
Poetry through visions
Photography captures the moment, immortalizing it with all its precious, barely perceptible baggage of emotions, sensations, and feelings. Jerry has the gift of an attentive gaze, of knowing how to observe with wisdom. He travels with ease from particular, minute detail, to the universal, while always picking and offering us the delicate – yet intense and vibrant – flower of poetry.
It is a poetry of images, an age-old, instinctive movement originating from the roots of the human essence, that continues to strike our hearts and our minds. Words are not necessary. Reality is described on its own, with no superfluous aids.
We watch Siena’s Palio pass before our eyes – instants marked by the drumbeats of the lavish Corteo Storico – the historical procession with its laurel-festooned pages, its ensigns proudly waving their flags. We can practically hear the fireworks and the clatter of hooves as the horses, after so long a wait, are finally set loose in the wild race. The ensigns’ faces appear to dwell upon a Renaissance-era, humanistic nostalgia for and reflection upon the portraiture of that happy historical period, immortalizing courtly life. These are faces that will never die.
The Palio has always been remembered in Siena as an inter-class phenomenon, an event desired by the people who take part just as they did in the long-ago past. The shouts that spur on the horses and jockeys are age-old ones – the fantastic and magic primordial balance between man and animal, the domain of nature in the shadow of the sacred, of the Virgin to whom the Palio is dedicated. The red-haired girls raising their voices in song and greeting their friends from the same Contrada appear as ancient priestesses and sorceresses celebrating the rite of the Palio, experienced by all generations simultaneously. In its very repetition, the timeless rite makes everyone equals.
Landscapes of gentle hillsides extending to the horizon, the heaped-up faces of dolls: toys that have abandoned their function, but stay to stare at us, strong and penetrating, as icons of a dimension we wish not to lose but to hold on to – our imaginative childhood. From atop their shelves, small clay statues observe a head supported by a hand without a body, in a surrealism alive in the absence of flesh, that penetrates into the weightless world of dreams. Jerry is a photographer and a subtle thinker, an instinctive seeker of truth through images.
A leg, a bronze foot, a hand brushing lightly against a turtle, the carousel of grace and play. The component of play seems constantly to seduce our artist: the hand as a symbol of consciousness, of touch. To comprehend an object, we must liberate our impulse to touch it. The hand creates the relationships and the very essence of art. This is La Fontana delle Tartarughe – Rome’s turtle fountain.
Once again, it is eternal, unmoving Rome that contemplates the universe changing around it: Michelangelo’s dome, that perfect masterpiece of mathematical ratios. In the sky, it appears light as a feather, and without substance – or better, made of the very stuff of dreams. The red sun overlaps with the dome, kisses it, and venerates it in total identification……. The sun, the light of Revelation, Ammon, God, Art,…..Beauty…. The Cult of Beauty pervades the very soul of Jerry, our artist.
Giuseppe Ussani d’Escobar
