Those who do not know Francesco Ciusa (Nuoro 1883 – Cagliari 1949), to whom the space Ilisso di Nuoro dedicates the largest monographic exhibition ever first set up (edited by Elena Pontiggia, until next April 5), too little knows of the Italian sculpture of the twentieth century. After specific studies in Florence where above all the Sicilian sculptor Domenico Trentacoste appreciates, Ciusa soon returns to his island from where he would no longer be gone, even if moving mainly between Sardinia other than the Christmas: the nuor of Grazia Deledda, the friend poet Sebastiano Satta and the painter Antonio Ballero, a pioneer of modernist folklorism who imprints the best Sardinian painting.
In Sassari he pairs with Giuseppe Biasi, the eldest of the folklorists, with whom he finds little artistic harmony. While warning, like him, the suggestion of Northern European modernism, Ciusa avoids any pictorial temptation by preferring to orient themselves on a robust and composed realism, controversial to the most commercial verism of Vincenzo Gemito, which is urged by the international diffusion of the socialist creed. With Biasi, if anything, the centrality of traditional Sardinian culture shares, celebrated in its unparalleled originality, with respect to which artistic modernity is not an end, but a means.
Returning to Nuoro, Ciusa creates the work for which he was best known, thanks to the enormous success that follows at the Venice Biennale of 1907: the Mother of the Ucciso, memory of a local episode of Banditism, in his Rodinian way in starting from the demeaning figure of the thinker. I wrote thus of the mother, of which they would have gladly seen, together with the Venetian plaster, also the consequent bronze (Rome, Gnamc) and marble versions (Pettinengo, Museum of Migrations): “The woman, in traditional costume with several layers, is represented sitting on the ground and closed in a hedgehog, the bare feet combined and the arms to tighten the legs under the knees, in the position in which the locations were barbaric. Usually watching the corpses before starting the complaints.
It could be enclosed in an egg, if the head, wrapped in a protruding veil on the front that leaves only the center of the face free, did not stand up and still proud, despite the annihilation for the pain experienced is so total that it does not leave room for anything but a glacial unpressibility. He has good game, in exploiting the shadow of the veil to cross the roughness of the face as a landscape of suffering, retaining in the epidermal furrows on which the light is nammed all the tension that the woman, as proof of her extreme, admirable dignity, introduced instead of triggering platitally. The rest is silence, Shakespeare would say, very profound, in which, however, to put it instead as there, “the island shone on the morning so black” “. In The Bread (1907), a Millet gleerman works the pasta on a densco, lying and barefoot.
You can breathe an air even classicist in the concentrate austerity of this massage that gives nothing to feeling, if anything pretended to be a respect that must start from those advanced feet with which they remind the bourgeois that the popular people allowed themselves to use shoes only on special occasions.
But realism is too close to Ciusa, who after returning from the Great War moves to Cagliari where he leads a production of local inspiration ceramics (Spica). Meanwhile, the moral gravity of the first works was beginning to dilute in a spiritual aspiration that from the form, which also preserves its typical constitutive compactness, intends to get the intuition of the revealing symbol, valid beyond the contingency of the immediate, reinventing the sartà according to characters in which the essence prevails over the simple external response.
The return (1922), in which the island anecdote is now sublimated, introduces a formal theme that unites the Faenza Domenico Rambelli, another sculptor sui generis of the time: the cloaked figure, with the clothing, metaphor of Michelagiolesca, but also Rodinian omnipotence of the matter from which only the spirit can emancipate itself, which minimizes the visibility of the human body. In this sense, the Bichromatic Sacco d’Obace (1922-23), with the aforementioned heads of father and son, emerging just from the big breek of a blocker, and the touching bell (1922-23), a work to which I bind me a special confidence.
Can it be said that Ciusa is moving towards the twentieth century Sarfattiano, also because of his adhesion to fascism? Was there any return to him in order, when the order had never lost it? Maybe not. With the exception of certain childhood heads that must, in Desiderio and Rossellino rather than to Medardo Rosso, his sense of full plasticity does not refer to models of the great Renaissance tradition with which to revive the national glories. If anything, the intent to customize the internationalist influence in a universalized sardience, as explicitly declared in women with a greyhound (1931), even erotic in conforming to the most fashionable déco, will be universalized.
But if it were not for the spontaneous reignation towards too loaded expressionisms, it would be said that the spiritualism of Ciusa, which is revealed in still camouflage symbolisms (The intriguing kiss, 1927; The triumphant amphora, 1927-28) as well as in stylized planarity to the primitive, soft and sliding, which have nothing of Latin, Etruscan or Giotto, Conciliable with the Italian root (The protected family, 1922-23; La vita, 1928-30; Love, Madonnina and Christ the deposed, 1931-32), is not at all far from that of Adolfo Wildt, an artist whose direction undertaken could certainly not be considered too reference for the twentieth century.
On the other hand, the singularity of Ciusa is also evident in monumentalistic, a genre that you could wrongly believe from its ropes, in which it proposes, without even leaving the exhibition (Iglesias, monument to the fallen, 1923-27), interpenetrations between symbolist naturalism and second futurism of twisted, but undoubted compositional efficacy (wings to the homeland, 1927). What about the applied arts of Ciusa beyond the aforementioned ceramic, the graphics, the formidable wood and iron mobilia? And the painting (surprising the dinner of the dead, 1910, in a vernacular Seizesionstil that is anticipating Casorati)? Those who do not know them, too little knows about it.
