Il mare che non si vede [The sea that can't be seen].

This is the title for the photographs that Giacomo Garzya puts on show this evening. As far as I am aware they cover virtually the whole arc of his public activity as a photographer. His first exhibition, Forti affetti [Strong affections], was held in 1994, and the first of these prints dates from 1995. In these same ten years or so Garzya has published four collections of poems, Solaria (1998), Maree [Tides] (2001), Passato e presente [Past and present] (2002), and Il mare di dentro [The sea within], 2005, and there is an obvious association between the latter and this evening's exhibition. To approach the photographs in front of us, to enter into them, as it were - leaving aside considerations on their sheer beauty, or the exquisite quality of the images - I believe it is necessary, at least en passant, to refer to the way in which Garzya, the photographer and poet, has evolved in this decade. This surely is a corollary of the anthological criterion, based on a thematic diachrony, he himself has chosen.
In his preface to Maree of 2001, Giuseppe Galasso remarked that Garzya's poetic world was "simple, albeit thoughtful; composed, even though vital". And "the spontaneous levity" with which "his verses [flowed], in spite of being so clearly honed and polished", showed no tendency, nor did it elicit any such propensity in the reader, "to lay claim to extreme tribulations, invidious truths, or unsuspected and improbable depths". Garzya's poetry was just what it appeared to be: "natural and credible in its human roots and in its bearing; the reader did not have to seek it out in the inner reaches of the temple", since "he could encounter it, simple and genial, on the threshold and had no difficulty in entering into a reassuring, if tenuous and subdued, colloquy".
In speaking of poetry Galasso here testifies to that colloquial poetics which Garzya had entrusted to the camera lens right from his first exhibition, Forti affetti, in 1994. The critic Valeria del Vasto drew attention to precisely this poetics in her review of the exhibition. With acute sensibility she saw the Leitmotiv of the journey, the exhibition's predominant theme, as being based, undeniably, on the places visited, "but above all on his own sentiments, states of mind, emotions", eluding "the dramatic immediacy of certain images of Capa or Cartier Bresson", or "the plasticity of the bodies photographed by Mapplethorpe". Garzya tends rather to rely on the observation of nature and of places, identifying with them, transferring "to them a sentiment, an 'affect', but one which is 'mediated, sublimated, precisely through contemplation". It is unusual for these pictures to narrate "the details", to dramatise the unique quality of the image.
In front of the photographs on view this evening, the insights contained in this review evoke a different register, and one which Garzya has frequented over these ten years. It is always a question of contemplation, but homing in on detail: the focus is not the satisfying sense of the whole but the disturbing kernel of the photograph. Naturally in this decade - and Garzya himself offers a diachronic approach to his activity - this is the aspect of his colloquial poetics that he has tended to play down. This is where we find the rapt concentration that seems to predominate, not the fusion with the observed "whole"; the concentration on oneself, the detail of "who we are" which is not absorbed into the whole but comes out in the detail, which commands our field of vision.
Valeria del Vasto refers to the poetics of Picasso in commenting on the images in Colori di Procida, 2002: "Painting is the craft of a blind man. He does not paint what he sees but what he imagines, what he says to himself about what he has seen". At this point the discourse on things turns to a mere indication of presence, of one's own being; from intimacy and confidence with things to the interior dimension: "the sea within" that is brought out, seeing "the sea that can't be seen".
This iconic shift was prefigured in the most recent collection, Il mare di dentro, 2005, as Patricia Bianchi acutely pointed out: "So Giacomo Garzya's poetry is indeed essential, or rather a pursuit of the primary essences of man by listening to one's own ego; it is no coincidence if the topic of poetry recurs as a search concerning the essential principles of life itself, namely water, air, earth and fire".
In the verses of Il mare di dentro, the equilibrium of one's being in the world is a state that has been attained which has nothing innate or even apparently "ingenuous", as was the case in the first collections. The day is not in itself "beautiful and joyful", it becomes it if one's life's work - using the eye as medium - is successful.
Writing poetry is
Capturing what is real/ and transfiguring it with the imagination/ this is beauty and makes the day joyful./ Making simple what is complicated/ discovering the harmony of lines/ in the shifting light/ in the scudding clouds/ this is beauty and makes the day joyful.
Writing poetry is crossing the boundary From shadow into light:
Sometimes/ artistic creativity/ and reflection/ on life's circumstances/ generate burnished oak leaves/ in sarcophagi imbued/ with light and hope/ in which death lies down serenely/ to live again.
If form is achieved then death lies down serenely.
Behind the apparent colloquialism of a life, which in another fine invention seeks expression
For a friend:
Downwind/ the sense/ of your existence./ Downwind/ you sag/ withholding the impulse/ to live amidst the billows/…,
we find in Garzya the communication of a tragic, reserved attitude to life, ready to position himself downwind, and sag, withholding the impulse to live amidst the billows, trusting in form to establish character.
This tragic, reserved attitude to life was already discernible in the Apollonian light which he sought out on the journey to Greece narrated in Solaria, 1998. Here it is the encounter between "joyful" and "limestone", nature's statuary, which aroused emotions he had already felt in Capri, on the Amalfi Coast and in Salento, "those, too, Greek lands". As in the vision of
Màni :
Stark, a well, a tower/ fertile tears/ Màni you dream of.// Rare tears/ deep limestone/ you hide.// Only sun-baked/ do you temper character,/ the Doric, I mean.
Here surely there is an anticipation of the insight Garzya reveals, almost without realising it, in this exhibition: the tension between Apollonian and Dionysiac, whose solution in form is the task of the poet and artist. In Nietzsche's characterisation of its Greekness, its mode of seeing and feeling:
"In the immediate comprehension of the figure we exult, all forms speak to us, there is nothing which is indifferent and not necessary. Nonetheless, in spite of the supreme life of this dreamt-of reality, there is still quite distinct in us the sentiment of its illusion" . Thus Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy. He himself emphasised "illusion", and added: "I could cite more than one testimony and the declarations of the poets".
In front of Garzya's photographs, and as we retrace his development as a poet, we come across just one such testimony and declaration. There is here what Nietzsche referred to as a "Homeric ingenuity", meaning one which is apparent, a "perfect foil for the Apollonian illusion"; perhaps some of its pristine integrity is lost in these images, but yet it wins through thanks to a sort of "metaphysical consolation", what Nietzsche saw as the true genius of the "profound Greek character, uniquely endowed for the most delicate and aching suffering, which has contemplated with a keen discernment the terrible process of destruction of the so-called universal history, as indeed the cruelty of nature, and runs the risk of desiring a Buddhist-like negation of will", and which art saves, and through art saves itself - life.
Today we can see that "Doric repulse", in the pursuit of form, of life's tragic essence, in the sentimental dialogue with nature and human artefacts which Garzya has conducted in his career as a poet and photographer, a latere as it were in the photographic counterpoint anthologised in this exhibition, giving way to the metaphysical drama of the detail, which is nonetheless held fast by form. And to some extent it seems always to have given way.
On seeing "the sea that can't be seen", as in these photographs, when "the sea within" is brought out, there is a change of tone in Garzya's photography, and likewise in his on-going rapport with words. From being syntactic, exemplificative, rational, this rapport becomes paratactic, indicative. … One step further on, a well-pondered step in the domain of feeling, on the part of someone who chooses not to gybe, to sail on at a leisurely pace, together with what is dear to him. After all, the destination is the same for all, whether we race or dawdle; it's just that those who speed on miss the scenery.

From the presentation of the exhibition "Il mare che non si vede", Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici, Palazzo Serra di Cassano. Naples, 24 February 2006 (traduzione in inglese del compianto amico Mark Weir).

EUGENIO MAZZARELLA