Dame e Pedine, 60 x 60 cm, oil on canvas.
Fuori dal Mio Tempo, 110 x 80cm, oil on canvas.
La Caduta degli Dei, 50 x 50 cm, oil on canvas.
Lasciati Andare, 60 x 70 cm, oil on canvas.
Poetiche Rivelazioni, 40 x 50 cm, oil on canvas.
Vestita di Nuovo, 60 x 80 cm, oil on canvas.
Voglio Farti Un Regalo, 50 x 70 cm, oil on canvas.
Voltiamo Pagina, 60 x 60 cm, oil on canvas.
Giuseppe Muscio exposes the reality making to relive in his pictures from the clear, precious, admirable execution the ancient miracle of the painting as a poetic replica of the life and of the things as addition of beauty to the film of the visible. The intellectual and optic brightness, the atmosphere of perfection of the vision that the paintings pervade coming out of his studio, few they have to do with a some today's hyperrealistic fashion of American importation, where the colour of the lived one is cooled and frozen rather, hibernated in the artifice of the photographic simulation, of the studied spot lights. On the opposite, in the Nuscio’s works we ascertain, also in the necessary or declared taking of distance of the pictorial look ,that symbolic, suggestive ,mixtured confront with the reality that we find in the artistic models of the past, in the elective way of the naturalist verb of the first decades of the 7th century: Caravaggio,Guercino,La
Tour,Recco, the great masters of the Flemish and Neapolitan still-life, whose immortal masterpieces Muscio has studied and copied for a long time, doing his best to recreate subjects of it and pigments, and, above all, trying to enter the spirit of that time.
Cultured and sensitive man, frequenter of De Chirico and of Cantatore, Muscio has well soon understood that for making to relive nowadays in that distant painting, the only school could not be enough, the diligence of the method, the rediscovery of the chemical formulas of pigments, lacquers and mysticisms, the techniques of the work, the homage and the tribute to the ancient, all pursues besides with a strong autodidactic wish, with analytical science. Muscio contemplate and aim something more hidden and difficult than the mere copy or simulation of the reality: it is instead a frame of mind, the emotion, the subjectivity and the interpretation that preside to the realistic effect of the painting. Muscio looks at last for the likelihood, which is the painting that avowedly becomes vivid and flagrant mirror of the reality through pictorial means, not through the photographic ones. In the pictorial simulation of the realities Muscio wants to return us the passion or that love for the visible one that is manifested as destiny since he was a child, when his grandfather brought him in the native country, Foggia, and he, little boy, was trying to copy and to depict what he was seeing, the fruit forms, the splendour of the grape’s clusters; the solemn majesty of the olive trees.
The whole creative experience of Muscio has been a pursuit and a himself measure with what is behind and perhaps over the mere technique: or the genius of the reality, that musical beauty of the image that always speaks in the works of the past (the past is still present, palpable, you consent it…For knowing who are we, we have to know who were we), even the silence of the painting, in the mute poetry, as it is defined by some easel fiction. The Muscio’s paintings must be scrutinized for a long time, read and reread, caressed for a long time with the look, loved. Only this way we will discover that their magisterial skill conduct us, little by little, to find again the secret musicality, appreciated harmony of what it is ordinary to our eyes, as a bottle leaned on a table or a figure of woman. After all it has been really the music, and not by chance, the other great love of Beppe Muscio: a passion for the swing and for the jazz discovered already at the age of eight years, and that has brought him to play for a long time, as professional drummer, in famous local as “Capolinea” of Milan, and in the places of musicians Jannacci and Radius.In the paintings of Muscio, the image is born for slow sedimentation, for an accurate and meticulous overlap of veiling to oil: it happens as a progressive epiphany of forms, of colours, of lights, in a maniacal perfectionism of the surrender that can bring the artist to use up to 20 different tonalities of colour and tones to represent the red peel of an apple. Each of his beautiful paintings is the result of at least fifty days of work, the distillate of a depth work, because also the technical knowledge brings benefits to the poetry. The operational specification of Muscio is exactly the same one of the beloved Dutch masters of the XVII century, able to paint amazing dead natures of the reality. A patient work that starts with the preparation of the canvas through chalk and hide of rabbit, in order to cover all the porosities of the support and to build a compact, dense surface. It follows the hand made pencil drawing, a delicate drawing, in order to bring to us, already through the construction of the volumes and the shadings, the whole delicacy of a nude female. There is that what is called “imprimitura” with ancient term, or the first draft, through summary chromatic preparation of the background, of the subject, of the composition, of the game of the bright sources. From here starts the real pictorial layout, well done, veiling each of which can be performed only when the preceding layer is completely dried. We can imagine then the slowness and the complexity of such a work: the painting must be performed to the 100% of the perfection; it is not enough to be satisfied of 60% or 70%.
Every work of Beppe Muscio is the heritage of a binding preparatory study of the composition, of a logical analysis of the painting, of a cross forced that is established by the initial and necessary imputes, or from the strategy of the direct and indirect lights as well as of the primary shades, that it is then at the base of the articulation of the full and the empty on the plan, of the imitation of the reflexes, of the thinness of the light gradation, of the light that turns mobile, plausible, not fixed as we see it in the imperialist vulgate. At last it is whole a visual and conceptual wisdom through which Muscio is able to offer us a new reality authentically revisiting the inheritance of the past in contemporary key.
Beppe Muscio impudently offers us not a photographic reality, an icy retinal copy, on the contrary a sort of poetic super-reality, refined by the accomplice to wink some pretence. “Humanity- writes Eliot in the Four Quartets -cannot bear too much reality”, Muscio knows it and because of this, from the poet he is, without deviate from the fashion and from the market, follows the work around a really personal statute of realism, to a peculiar stylistic figure of the changes of the reality that as author of first line confirms him in the today's context of the art, an unpublished case of quality and value.
In his ordinates dead natures - cups, plates, bottles, glasses and fruits always prepared in a clear and essential syntax, congruent to the mind and to the eyes, in a prodigious surrender of subjects, of reflexes and of transparencies, in a refined accord of brown, grey, light brown colours - so as in his stupendous naked models - always absorbed, melancholy, with the eyes turned elsewhere - we see, with thankfulness, to flow the sap and the blood of a dreamt reality, of a lost time, of a time that is just like a musical break : preserved through the poetry of the will of the case and the evanescence of the sense.
Domenico Montalto
Art Critic
