Thus, between superstition and animism,
Esposito invents his own brimstony inner ethnography.
He repeats, as a creature in perfect tune with
the cosmic elements, the palindromic path of
Heraclitus, for whom "upward, downward,
the way is one and the same". Everything
returns, everything is reabsorbed by its origin.
There are no one-way trajectories, beginning
and end converge, Eros and Thànatos born
of the same egg, just as Pulcinella's father
came from a turkey egg.
Naples becomes the aleph of reference, the fantastic
melting pot where the imagination is granted
free rein, where thoughts take on a magma-like,
eruptive consistency, where "everything
mixes", as he artist confesses, describing
his studio at Palazzo Sansevero. So why be amazed
if a poor fellow in a mask gets nailed to the
cross, the latest sacrificial victim immolated
in the hope of a salvation humanity (and indubitably
the microcosm of Naples represents the entire
human race) is no longer capable of awaiting?
The blasphemous links back up with the innocent
in the sign of a rebirth that will certainly
come, when the world will be able to return
to its cycle of damnation and redemption in
pursuit of a survival that seems to have become
its only chance.
And there is little doubt that the victim will
know how to be reborn in a new guise, filling
our everyday world with himself and his gestures.
Pulcinella, or what is left of him after the
liturgy of the sacrifice, disintegrates in a
prodigious tumult of his projections, a sort
of atomization of the symbols with which he
is identified. In other words, Esposito continues
to speak his language through the numberless
transfers of that figure-guide. Between primitivism
and expressionism, it is an uncontrollable contagion
the sign exalts with daring gestures, to the
point of the equivalence of painting and sculpture,
which become disciplines open to any excess
of fantasy.
The "improper" use of the legacy of
stereotype is proof of an existential laceration
that makes everything ambiguous and double,
when Dionysiac exulting is transformed into
a grimace, jests into lamentations, eggs into
skulls; when the blood of San Gennaro, the blood
of Naples, coagulates and liquefies more due
to alchemical intervention than to divine grace.
Behind the by-now-virtual mask of Pulcinella
is concealed a world of multiple adjectives:
esoteric, hybrid, chthonic, orgiastic, eschatological,
macabre, surreal and more. Here obscenity, too,
becomes liberating against the sense of sin.
And yet, or perhaps precisely because of all
this, everything reassembles on a human scale,
as in the theater of Edoardo (De Filippo, ed.),
where the Neapolitan and the universal coincide
perfectly.
Definitively speaking, Esposito "escapes"
in order to go deeper. Beyond the gibbousness,
the sores and stigmata of the likes of Pulcinella,
beyond the puppet-totem that today has assumed
the form of a canopic jar inside which any miracle
or magic is possible, we find the unmistakable
signs of life. "One must imagine Sisyphus
happy", Camus wrote, and Esposito cannot
help but agree.
Giuliano Serafini
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