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Giarre, Oct. 21, 2022
Opened today inside the Radicepura Botanical Park in Giarre, Compito #1, the new work by artist Adrian Paci. A 140-square meter floor mosaic, whose theme is the result of the artist’s research work and collaboration with the Community of Sant’Egidio in 2017, an occasion of encounter with fragile experiences and people who have become an inspiration, with the desire to translate and bring back to the artistic context a form of writing unconnected to a codified alphabet.
“When I was invited to visit the drawing classes of the Community of Sant’Egidio in Rome,” says Adrian Paci, “I had no idea what to expect. I knew about their attention to situations of marginality and conflict, but I had had no direct contact. Among their guests I met Maurizio. He did not speak to me, but he wrote incessantly in his diary. The pages were filled with marks – no letters, just marks. They were not just scribbles: a kind of rhythm and a sense of order joined the enigma of these mysterious signs that were impossible to decipher. I was so fascinated by them that I did not want to lose track of them, but rather try to replicate them in a work by giving them a new meaning.”
From Maurizio’s notebooks, the Compito series was born. The work Compito #1 a 10 by 14 foot floor mosaic in marble and lava stone tiles, two-color monochrome on scales of grays and whites with hints of red-is placed inside one of the new terraces of the Radicepura Botanical Park, entirely dedicated to a selection of citrus fruits from the Piante Faro plant nurseries. These include ancient citrus trees from the Valley of the Temples, preserved thanks to a collaboration between the Radicepura Foundation, FAI Giardino della Kolymbethra and the Botanical Garden of Palermo, which are committed to safeguarding rare varieties dating back to the 18th century that have now become part of the scientific collection of the Botanical Garden of Palermo and the Radicepura Botanical Park, expanding its biodiversity content.
Task#1 is a diary of images and signs that reveal, to the artist’s eye, their hidden meaning, without the need to decipher and translate. The graphic signs have been replicated and reported in a welcoming space that becomes a relational place in which to find, through the observation of the other, oneself. Paci is not interested in interpreting Maurizio’s mysterious and almost shamanic writing, but reports it with affectionate curiosity and fidelity because he has been a fortunate spectator of it and understood its expressive urgency. The place where the work is placed – the citrus terrace – gives a new meaning to these signs, they become rhythm and primordial force of life in a long time such as that of plants.
Inside the Radicepura Botanical Park is based the Radicepura Foundation, which since 2017 has been promoting the culture of the Mediterranean landscape as an engine of development – social and economic – through the realization of events, workshops, meetings, including the Radicepura Garden Festival, a biennial of the Mediterranean garden whose next edition will take place in spring 2023. This is the context for the installation of Adrian Paci, who has worked closely with the Foundation since 2019, choosing the Park as his artist residency.
“Since the first edition of the festival, we have been interested in exploring the theme of gardens through the use of various languages, creating contaminations that are useful to feed an ongoing debate on themes that are at the origin of our daily work: land, Mediterranean, biodiversity, landscape culture, respect. Adrian Paci has offered us his gaze, passionate, open and overwhelming, giving us back a work that takes us back to an almost primitive writing, to a time when man was able to live in harmony with nature by looking at it with that sense of mystery and devotion that we lack today. The placement in the terrace of citrus trees, emblem of this fertile land and precious fruit since the times of Magna Graecia, which we celebrate here by giving home to an extraordinary work such as Compito#1, is not accidental,” says Mario Faro, founder of Radicepura Park and creator of the Radicepura Garden Festival.
The unveiling of the work took place in the Radicepura Botanical Park in the presence of the artist and Radicepura Foundation President Mario Faro, and with the participation of Leonardo Caffo (philosopher), Franco Lacecla (anthropologist), and Antonio Perazzi (landscape architect and artistic director of the Radicepura Garden Festival).