Mai Sedersi sugli Allori
D e d i c a t e d t o C a r l i n a
According Bufalino’s way of saying, I would like to entitle
this note which has been dedicated to Carla Tolomeo’s works,
“Perizia di parte” (a “subjeted survey ”).
For this reason, while I’m showing you the documents, I
have to tell you that Carlina (Carlina means “little Carla”. This is
her own name and so she is Carlina because, as Savinio says,
sooner or later the names finally become to be the people and
the objects that they define) is an artist I admire and she is my
friend since 30 years; more or less since when I came to Milan
from the south as many other hopeful emigrants and I met her
man: Giancarlo Vigorelli. I would like to tell you it is really very
difficult to find a couple of artists like them – this is not a way
to avoid the point and speak about other things, but it is neces-
sary to start from here to understand the marvelous phantas-
magoric world of Carlina –. Of course when I speak about the
word “artist” I intend it in the Casanova way, and I’m referring
to that person who was able to make his life a piece of art.
You should have seen Carlina and Giancarlo, at the end of
the ’70s. For me, just arrived in the city of the “Scala”, they
were the protagonists of a moving party where literature and
visual arts were propellant, a nourishment and life itself.
In this way Manzoni became part of my personal human ex-
perience and in this way I understood because a mutual friend
(a great friend of Giancarlo and Carlina) had entitled his famous
essay “Letteratura come vita (Literature as life).
“Arte come vita” (art as life): this is the way nowadays we
could define Carlina Tolomeo’s works, which are exhibited in
Vicenza. Art as joy of living, giving ourselves up in the innocent
astonishments and enjoying the word- from north to the south,
from east to west – in order to put later together the bright
trophies of the background, in the memory.
In the nowadays map of Italian painting it is hard to find
some artists like Carla Tolomeo
(please note I use her real name here, in order to not make
mistake), so pleased with the privilege of freedom, which im-
plies the creation of her own world, where the shapes and the
colors are free from any mutual conditionings.
It could seem a paradox to declare it considering Carlina
chooses common objects to build her works of art. But in all this
lays her own talent. While I am writing this note my eyes are full
of her padded materials, the brilliant colors, which can be easily
find in her marble and sculptures too; and here I would like to
take advantage of this opportunity to tell that Carlina Tolomeo,
while she is drawing, she is able to show such beautiful colors
as she wears colored dresses which really match with her
smile. She has a smile of a woman to who the life has given a
lot…and she is well aware not to have wasted any hour of it.
Look at her chairs and her sofas, while the parrots and the
butterflies flies around her and the tropical fruits seem to be
created just in that moment, in her private garden, which is
Adam and Eva’s one (this is the miracle of the art!). This is her
wild and never ending reproducing of the beauty of the world,
its colors, its eccentricities and its parties.
Considering I have started this note mentioning Bufalino,
I would like to conclude with one of its quote, with the aim
to treasure his well-advice concept (of course not as a critic
because I will let other people make it). That concept seems to
come out from the works of art we are speaking about:
“It is easy to get lost inside, to fall through with the eyes, as
well as we are shipwrecked in the metaphysical pleasantness
and in the mystery of a deep mirror.
In this way the relationship between the observer and the
image is no more critic and there is no more material for any
investigation and fight but it assumes the appearance of a
visual seduction, which slightly overcome”.
Matteo Collura
