Today I will tell a story of friendship, passion and architecture. However, it is above all a story of encounters and continual exchanges that have unexpectedly but spontaneously found their main expression and fulfilment in a work of art.
The protagonists of this story are Enzo Maiorano, co-founder and art director of Archilovers, Francesco Maggiore, engineer and expert in History of contemporary Architecture, Vincenzo D'Alba, architect and artist, and Francesco Moschini, architect, art and architecture historian and full professor of History of Architecture at the Polytechnic University of Bari.
Enzo, Francesco and Vincenzo met at the Polytechnic University of Bari, when they were students. It is in this period that the profound respect, which still unites them today, arose. A fundamental role in this encounter was played by prof. Moschini, whose teachings guided them through a cultural itinerary in which each of them recognized himself. He marked all their lives in a significant but different way, becoming at the same time the spiritual bond in their great friendship.
No longer students, today Enzo, Francesco and Vincenzo express their own professional talent in the field of architecture in different ways, still living with exchanges and reciprocal contaminations.
Co-founder of the network for architecture and design (Archilovers, Archiproducts, Archiportale and Edilportale), Enzo has been tackling the challenge of talking about the complex world of building on a daily basis for over 14 years. This is where his desire of ‘representing’ this complexity came from. But how? The idea was to create a work of art in the spaces of the Archilovers Headquarters.
Therefore Enzo asked Vincenzo to draw his own personal interpretation of a 5m x 3m wall, in a sort of synthesis between art, imagination and feeling, ‘contaminating it’ with his own intimate knowledge of the context: the network, but above all the people working for it.
3 days and 3 nights non- stop, in a frenetic and almost compulsive abandon to creation, were Vincenzo’s response. The intense and passionate hours of work were summarised in a video that, in just 2 minutes, reconstructs and reveals the evolution of the work, managing to capture all its complexity.
“Some of you already know him, he is Vincenzo D’Alba, architect, sculptor, painter, multifaceted artist. Expert in History of Art and of Architecture, as well as our great friend and admirer.
Today, after several days and nights of work Vincenzo presents us a work in which I asked him to represent the complexity of the relations and the forces that move the art of construction: from the desires, to the ideas, to the projects, to the work sites, up to the life of the Architectures.
This work is called "Fabbricare, fabbricare, fabbricare”, as is recited in a beautiful poem by Dino Campana, that is close to mine and Vincenzo’s heart, and goes like this:
Fabbricare, fabbricare, fabbricare (Build, build, build)
Preferisco il rumore del mare (I prefer the noise of the sea)
Che dice fabbricare fare disfare (That says build make unmake)
Fare e disfare è tutto un lavorare (making and unmaking all is work)
Ecco quello che so fare (This is what I can do)
(Dino Campana, Opere, Canti Orfici e altri versi e scritti sparsi, ed.TEA)
So lose yourself, or find yourself again in Vincenzo’s work”.
This is how Enzo Maiorano introduced the work, entitled "Fabbricare, fabbricare, fabbricare”, in front of the 80 members of the team, curious to discover what was behind the curtain that was about to be raised.
And to better ‘lose ourselves and find ourselves’ in Vincenzo’s work, we shall let ourselves be guided by the words of prof. Moschini:
“When the men keep silent, it will be things to say Amen”. Rarely like in this work, created for the offices of Edilportale within the cycle "Work projects" by A.A.M. Architettura Arte Moderna, does the title “Fabbricare, fabbricare, fabbricare” incarnate the relentless and tireless work of the author.
Amongst the architectural finds, the figurative wealth and the symbolic apparatus that make it up, we find ourselves up against gestures of art that now seem lost. The uniqueness of the work is in the fact that despite the great and inextricable movement of lines, we can perceive an equally big and instinctive silence made up of hundreds of signs which keep themselves in a paradoxical balance.
It seems there is the echo of the words of Rainer Maria Rilke when he wrote “there is an obscure patience […], a silent and superior forbearance, a little of the great patience and benevolence of nature, which starts with nothing and continues silently and severely on its long journey towards abundance”.
Through a minute and scrupulous creation, Vincenzo D’Alba organises a host of references concentrated in an infinite space enclosed in a “brick”. At first glamce the series of signs is perceived as a lump, like magma, capable of expressing almost abyssal engulfments into the matter. Finally, when looking at it all over again, all the signs seem to freeze in a perfect graphical synthesis comparable to the pictorial complexities of Hans Memling, into the human bundlings of Luca Signorelli, into the surreal lists of Hieronymus Bosch, to reach the absolute abstraction of Saul Steinberg.
D’Alba invokes and manages a beauty made of classical visions, an infinite number of surfaces, which are not left to be seduced by meanings, to portray something bigger, more worrying and maybe even crueller …"
(Francesco Moschini)
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