BOSCO'S MOON
The moon, in Alcamo, is not like elsewhere. Its light is different, it is closer and brighter. One feels as if one can touch it. And someone has. Someone has started to speak about love right from here.
The Sky, first of all, underneath this sun. In this light, with these fragrances, in this heat. But even more so, at night, before the sea, when everything is closer:
“Most fragrant fresh rose, you appear when summer comes,
women long for you, both young and married ones;
pull me away from this fire, if you wish to do so;
I can’t find peace, night or day, because of you,
thinking of you, my lady.”
Undoubtedly, these verses must have echoed, time after time, in the heart of Giacinto Bosco, a young sculptor from Alcamo who is, more than others, in love with the moon and close to it.
He develops nearly his entire work around this theme. Two lovers who, in every way and by any means, try and climb to the moon.
And they manage to climb using a rope. But a staircase will also do, it will allow them to reach it directly and comfortably. And, again, a spiral staircase, on which they both move to then grab the crescent moon, and take it with them or sit on it.
How might it feel sitting on the moon? But it may be suspended on a cone, a shell with a staircase around it.
When conquered, the moon may become a swing, but it is also what a tightrope is to an acrobat. The moon is the lovers’ friend. And the lovers play with it.
The moon is poetry. Leopardi speaks to it and asks, as we can recall:
“What do you do, moon, aloft? Let me know
What, silent moon, you do.
You rise at night, and go;
You contemplate the deserts, then you rest.
Are you ever tired
of never changing scenes?
Do you not loathe returning, are you still
eager for these ravines?
The shepherd’s life is like your life.”
The moon is silent, the moon is the accomplice, the moon is Sabrina’s nose, the moon accompanies the lovers in the solitude of the night.
And Bosco does not narrate all this, he translates it into images; the lovers are naked and slender.
They chase each other when they are far away and they embrace when they finally reach the moon, which is the destination of their thoughts and wishes. Bosco is a simple soul, an essential sculptor.
He is romantic, he brings Folon’s thoughts on the Sicilian sea. He makes Giacometti kind. To him, sculpture is a love declaration, the expression of the kindness of the heart. Some sort of romance.
The man’s skin is darker, the woman’s skin is lighter. The lovers look for each other, they hold hands, they embrace, they caress, they help each other to grab the moon, they kiss.
Bosco’s touch is light, the surface is rough, like that of a lizard taken from inside a dried prickly pear, easy to find in Alcamo.
His inspiration is lyrical, as it was for Attilio Torresini, Francesco Messina, Silvestre Cuffaro, Aurelio De Felice, Luigi Broggini. Bosco sculpts with delicacy, with discretion. He moulds the material with the precision of a chaser.
Sicily felt the need for a “nuraghe” sculptor, an Etruscan sculptor. The Greeks thought of using small bronze statues as votive objects or in the cult of the dead.
That is where Bosco starts, as if to the idea, to absolute love, to moon contemplation, nothing has been added in the last two thousand and five hundred years.
The thoughts of the artists of Magna Graecia, not so far from Alcamo, in Selinunte, in Segesta, go through Bosco’s mind with unvarying spirit, and time stands still, with unchanged poetry, like in Sappho’s verses, like in Alcaeus’s verses.
The Greek poets’ Moon, and Ciullo’s Moon, and Leopardi’s Moon… that is Bosco’s Moon.
CRITICA
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