“Who will deliver us from the Greeks and Romans? . .. ” was the question which arose the intellectuals of the Enlightenment and of Romanticism in the certainty that the question, then, is not permitted a glimpse of the solutions. The Greeks and Romans, we would never let me. The classical tradition always there would have been on him, as heavy as the boulder of Sisyphus. In the shade, irrevocable license to the rock painters, and poets, even though they are impatient, they would have to operate. Modernity has made inroads in the history of art and has crossed the century as a sword, the first with the Positivismi and Naturalismi, with the posters of political and social commitments, with the Revolutions and with the Complaints, then with the Avant-garde. The Greeks and Romans seemed to have been lost for ever. The myths and codes of figurative and for two millennia, had given image to the culture of the West, sprofondavano and disappeared as a Atlantis definitively buried. It was fatal that all of this happened. Now that the century is now the terminus of the line forces us to financial statements and conclusions, we can say that there was a reason for this !the eclipse as well as there is a reason why, today, in return. The contestation of the classic, lari a time, against the Gods, and the Heroes are in the genetic code of our european culture, and occasionally returning to recurring cycles, together with the Revolutions needed to disrupt and innovate. But, in our culture, there is also the nostalgia, the tradition, there is the feeling of the unbroken continuity with the models that we feel, in spite of everything, the close and fraternal. Are emotions that at certain moments of the story sink as karst rivers, and then suddenly re-emerge. In reality, there can be free of the Greeks and Romans. No one in our century, has understood this better than the great revolutionary Pablo Picasso. The sculptures of Paul Villages (and it will not be without significance is the fact that they are placed at the end of the century, in the years between il1984 and il1999) are the demonstration of Venus crystals (detail) – 1999 – terracotta that the Return is not only possible, but necessary, indeed fatal. As Rutilio Numaziano wrote his “De Reditu” away from Rome sacked by Barbarians, bringing in the eyes and in the heart the emotional memory of the violated majesty, so Paul Villages away from our century, the beautiful and fierce, bringing with them the icons of the Immortals. Almost wanted to transfer into the new Millennium, the reasons themselves of the Classics.
Paolo Borghi know that the city of the Immortals has been ravaged by Modernity as well as Rutilio Numaziano knew that his Rome had been irreparably scarred by the iron and fire of the Barbarians. The recovery can only take place under the sign of nostalgia and regret and can be achieved only for segments disjointed that the memory and the dream together. When the art contemporary you look in the ancient art sa contemplarsi in a mirror shattered. If not so, the artist would fall in the frigid swamp of casts from antique dealers and sterile quotations. For the Villages as the contemporary artists who have chosen the Old and the mitografie classic star of their expressive path (I think Igor Mitoraj, but also Savinio and De Chirico) the contemplation of the mirror broken is only possible on condition that the keys are interpreted ve that has brought Modernity. They are two, both are necessary: the Symbolism and Surrealism. The Symbolism, so that the ancient images become a sign and figure of the present time; Surrealism because the present time, the dress of the antique appearance, to take an absolute meaning, “metareale” and “metastorico”. It so happens that the sculptures of the Villages become enigmas, charades philosophical allusions to an “elsewhere” which dwells in our soul, and through our dreams before they manifest in the visible world. The Symbolism and Surrealism of Paolo Borghi use some figures based choices in the repertoire of the infinity of the history of art: one of these is the Island of the dead Böcklin, the other is the image of a man and a woman lying, frontal and symmetrical the face and the bust high on the elbow, as in funerary urns from the etruscan. Then Apollo and Daphne by Bernini. These figures are based, to be understood as magnets or emotional rather like mirrors of the soul, and constantly broken. On the cliff - 1999 - bronze 155 x 94 x 39 cm (Collezione Contini - Venice) cut, reworked, the approach, in visits to the silent Gods, the Heroes, the Centaurs together to the mountains, to the rivers, to the city.
Paolo Borghi has a conception of the world pantheistic, metaphorical and anthropomorphic. Pantheistic because he knows that God (or the gods) living things, metamorphic, because everything ceaselessly changes and transforms under the sky, anthropomorphic because mutations and metamorphoses take on human form. This is, probably, the most fascinating aspect of his “surrealism and classic.” It's nice to think that the clouds of heaven, the great rivers that criss-cross the plains, the majestic mountains and the city, are supervised by wonderful beings, enigmatic and immortal. And that on the contrary, the plains and the rivers, the mountains and the cities, are “those” gods, perhaps benevolent, perhaps indifferent, always inscrutable. There is an aspect of the sculpture of Paul Villages that it is appropriate to emphasize because it is the connotation of the primary and indispensable aspect of his poetics: the technical perfection, the supreme quality of the craft. His metamorphic Olympus, his parnassiana the City of the Immortals, call for silence, and splendor. It is the splendor of the wonderful bronzes coated and treated with the expertise of a goldsmith ( The Alps, the Horizon far away, In the Wind of Morgantina, the Daughters of Night), is the silence and luckiest of noble materials (marble, terracotta) when they know that the artist has them touched with the wisdom of the hand, like the wisdom of the heart.
Antonio Paolucci
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