ART AS PICTORIAL, DECORATIVE, MATERIAL AND GRAPHIC EXPRESSION

BIAGIO PRATICO'

Giorgio  De Cesario is a versatile artist who takes advantage  to the utmost of his acquaintances in the several fields of his work (architecture, furnishing, design, graphics, photography, painting, sculpture) in order to build up his pictorial, material, decorative expression.
Every  work of his is characterized, in fact, by an amalgam of decorative and graphical elements with sculptural ones represented above all by faces in white clay. To all appearances they are  inexpressive, emaciated, eaten away by time. They come out of the canvas with their long and linear necks and with their ears refined by earrings recalling Egyptian symbols according to  which the right one receives the breath of Life and the left one the breath of Death.
They are, above all, faces and bodies of women, caught in their eroticism and in their daily life, representing this way the topicality of our times, a sort of dowels of a real and, at the same time, imaginary world that De Cesario has been building for fifteen years. It is a dualism shining through all his works. An age in which,  he abandons Caravaggio and Giorgione (the two artists who have initially influenced his painting and whose presence is felt in the use of chiaroscuro) and gives a new impulse to his search with the employment of new and various techniques. The result is "Procreation" where the character is a child with an amorphous face in relief and a long neck. All that has marked the abandonment of his old style. It is a spontaneous work, born  without any plan at the roots.
De Cesario, nearly in trance, guided by an external hand, begins his way, with this died-face character and deals with all the fundamental problems of our society.
Even if the faces, the characters, at first sight, are not normal and seem unreal, if we observe them carefully we discover that every face has its expression in function of the purpose for which it was born. They are linked with reality through the chromatic search that sends back to Impressionism, Expressionism and is also connected with Romanticism and Dadaism. Moreover, the “Eight-faced woman” reminds us of Cubism and its shapes.
So, it is a kind of painting that conveys a message coming from a long way away. When  De Cesario works, he withdraws from the world in order to live in his own world, a reality that he  has imagined, where many people are having a banquet: they have been  living for a long time but they do not have an expressive force of their own, they receive it from De Cesario. Summing up, we can say that De Cesario is a puppeteer, he moves the wires of their history. And not only. He makes them live with irony, not with tragicalness.



SYMBOLIC DREAMS IN GIORGIO DE CESARIO’S ART



PAOLA BERARDI


"Flowing and soft lines define slight bodies dipped in a dream dimension. It is the representation of a truth hidden behind clay faces quite similar to chilling masks in which all the expressive power of a deep spiritual communication is concentrated. The faces in relief are dramatically in contrast with the force of the linear decorations emphasized in an obsessive way by serpentine  figures. The reference to symbolic dreams and to a  surrealist uneasiness is obvious. De Cesario revises all that through an immediate figurative language that allows him to record a dramatic social truth.


THE ICONOGRAPHIC MESSAGE IN GIORGIO DE CESARIO’S ART.



DOMENICO SALAMINO


"The painter does not have only to paint what he sees around himself but also what he sees in himself (…)".
This sentence, written by Hespar David Friedrich, seems to fit Giorgio De Cesario’s pictorial poetics.
In  fact, what the painter sees, studies, analyzes and reproduces "in himself" is expressed through the shapes of his Art.
By digging in the sublimity of the dream, he wishes to lead us, through a particularly symbolic iconography, to a meditated reading of today’s reality.
This way he creates a real apparatus of images, made up of apparently useless things in which it is easy for the inexpert observer to get lost. An apparatus in which shapes, colors, volumes and objects create a sort of equipment useful to a communication of concepts, made also of explicitness and hermetism. In these works we can find one of the "essences" of the contemporary art: the firm will to lead observers along the "way of the discovery" and to put several messages and elements (often hidden by particular techniques), in order to reach the definition of the general contents.
It is, therefore, the interplay of many small and important facets that  give, at last, a unitary entirety. In a sense, the acquaintance of the contemporary historical evolution has a lot of importance in this kind of painting.
Anyway, there is a certain reference to the symbolism of  dreams, whose roots are in Freud and in Dalì. But what prevents De Cesario from recovering pure Surrealism are the continuous and explicit references to modern social troubles.
The academic learning, even influencing him, does not contrast the way and the moment of his  expression. It strengthens him instead, thus determining a solid cognitive foundation.
The cognition becomes the fulcrum of the image itself. By means of his knowledge, he often reaches unexpected solutions but of clear demonstrative essence.  Every work conveys exactly, what the man-artist thinks over, and so image and content become a universal heritage. His iconology is the instrument often used to reach  a specific purpose:  that is to lead the observer, little by little, along the winding way of understanding his message. In this context all his representations assume a value!  De Sanctis writes:  "The shape is not a priori, it is not something standing apart….;  indeed it is generated  from the contents in the mind of the artist: like content like shape ". Therefore the long and thin neck (not to get confused with Modigliani’s) and the morphologic structure of the faces, become the symbol of a new vision and a new concept of man:  emphasizing the physical deformations, De Cesario delineates a new mental formation.
He underlines the concept, according to which thought, meditation and rationality are the means to understand the real dramas that, many times, gush from "merely material requirements", from vanity, from individual  hedonism. These last elements are summed up in the obsessive presence, of earrings which link the "human egoistic perversions" to the social dramas of which the same characters are the symbols. The so-called “Many-faced sculpture” is a clear example of reference to today’s social troubles as well as “The Drug-addict”, a sort of modern Cleopatra, encircled by a snake (symbol of her suffering sexuality). Another interesting work is “Anorexics”, where the characters seem to laugh at modern man’s decay and, at the same time, seem to be in search of a new aesthetic ideal. However, any work of his can be a moment of “analysis”, and an occasion to meditate. This way, art takes on a deeper meaning: it becomes spiritual and material activity by means of which man expresses his inner world made up of particularly striking images.


MASKS, FEELINGS AND COLOURS


EMMANUEL MONS DELLE ROCHE


Happiness is not obvious, Giorgio De Cesario seems to say. The characters are white men between beautiful chromatic harmonies. Moreover, they are moulded as if they wore masks, but these do not succeed in hiding their restlessness, their difficulty of living. They are white (without any colour, or of all the colours) in a colourful universe, perhaps because the artist leaves the spectator the freedom to choose his own colour; moreover appearance dissociates these beings from reality: they are unable to understand it, and so they disguise themselves in a mask (but it does not hide their feelings, I repeat). Perhaps their spirit (dissociated from the body and the external reality, which explains these long necks) is different from the “tangible” truth. In De Cesario’s works there is all that. I think only his self-portrait is different: he is only an  “objective” white man, the others are black because they are the perfect unknown. But perhaps I am wrong about his intentions. The freedom he leaves implies even mistakes. Anyway, I am charmed by all that.


LONELINESS IN GIORGIO DE CESARIO’S ART

ANTONIETTA FULVIO


" Loneliness", the title the artist has chosen, is the key-word that allows us to enter  his pictorial world.  A  world made of loneliness, even if our age represents the triumph of  communications.  The sensibility of the artist wants to underline the deep sense of loss  lodging in the heart of  modern man, more and more overwhelmed by the fear of dreaming, of getting in tune with the others and of communicating. Even if the glamorous covers spread about by the mass media want to transmit the idea of a real collective happiness, and in spite of the capillary diffusion of the cellular phones , the satellite transmissions that cancel the geographic distances, and the great world of the internet, in spite of all that, there is a great sense of loneliness, just as Salvatore Quasimodo said. The poet recognized the existence of a sun beam that pierces through but lightens as well, so, according to Giorgio De Cesario, art can be the means to reveal human suffering, but, at the same time, it can trace a path to overcome it. Clay faces come out of the paintings, where the real protagonist turns out to be the colourful  background representing the energy and all the vitality of  nature, the only one, perhaps, able to fill up the emptiness we feel somewhere in our heart.  (from Leccesera, 20/21 April 2002).



THE ESSENCE Of  PAINTING  IN GIORGIO DE CESARIO’S ART

MADDALENA CARUSO



 homage to Giorgio De Cesario’s art
Rome, 04 June 2001

Innovation. 
New tendency.
Spectral,
but sweet,
expressive
clay faces.
Essence of beings
stolen from
primitive caves,
reinterpreted
with meticulous
chromatic search.
Upsetting characters
rise up;
sad and dignified,
timidly
beg
aid and solidarity. 
Families consecrated
By ancestral rituals. 
Flares
of freedom
of the archaic
rural culture.
Light
Color
Lines
Search and Communication
The essence of Giorgio DE CESARIO’s painting.