The Theory of Contrasts
"The island of jasmine and rotten fish, of sublime hearts and sharp blades."
Dacia Maraini
The Bagheria, Aspra and Casteldaccia area has been a place of contrasts and contradictions for centuries.
Historic villas
and industrial warehouses,
strong proletarian politics and great nobility, scenic beauty and cementification.
All this has been
a source of inspiration
becoming fertile ground for a certain artistic production, with the proliferation of unique talents in different disciplines.
Eighteenth-century villas, coastal landscapes
citrus gardens, although trapped in a contemporary urban clutter that has grown out of proportion, layered in time and space, continue to exert their imaginative power, suggesting that
Theory of Contrasts
that the city of Bagheria, between orange blossom and lime, offers to those who know how to look at it with more depth.
From this basic assumption on the theory of contrasts, comes a desire for in-depth study that traverses the iconic places and authoritative faces of the territory and reconstructs, between necessary memory and new languages, the deposit of a fertile land for Art and Culture. Salt of a forthright and contradictory land, the same one that has seen the proliferation of unique characters who with their talent have brought Sicily and its beauty to the world.
"How could such a small strip of land, have produced so much beauty?"
The answer to this question runs through the analysis of three fronts: the cultural, the anthropological and clearly the artistic. and comes alive again through the words of the historian Rosario Lentini, the anthropologist Ignazio Buttitta, the writer and screenwriter Paolo Pintacuda, the director Nico Bonomolo and the painters Michele Ducato, Alessandro Bazan and Arrigo Musti.
Michele Ducato
Cart Painter
Michele Ducato, an architecture graduate and Sicilian master decorator, inherited the family tradition, learning the technique and passion as a child in his father’s atelier. His vivid works depict Sicilian heritage, including paladins, knights, damsels and patron saints. Some of his works have been shown in several exhibitions, at the Palazzo dei Normanni in Palermo and in New York (including one at the Italian Cultural Institute).
“A tradition, a craft, skills, travel through generations, through passion.”
Nico Bonomolo
Filmmaker
Nico Bonomolo was born in Palermo in 1974. He has participated in many major international festivals with his short films, earning numerous awards, including, a David di Donatello, the Bruce Corwin Award at the Santa Barbara Film Festival, the Gryphon Award at the Giffoni Experience, two David di Donatello nominations, one Silver Ribbon nomination and one Golden Globe nomination. His two latest short films, Confino and Maestrale, qualified for Oscar nominations.
“Bagheria is like a scarred work of art, in which you can still see flashes of the work that was. And these come through, giving everything a very special charm”
Alessandro Bazan
Painter
Alessandro Bazan is an Italian contemporary painter and artist born in Palermo in 1966. He is one of the leading exponents of the Palermo School art movement. His works are characterized by an expressive figurative style, often with ironic and surreal tones. He has exhibited in numerous galleries and museums in Italy and abroad, earning recognition for his ability to combine tradition and modernity. Bazan is also a professor of painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Palermo.
“My work is also within this fundamental dualism of attraction to what is sometimes deleterious or vice versa, to the utter insignificance of what we consider aesthetic”
Paolo Pintacuda
Writer and Screenwriter
He was born in Bagheria in 1974. During his childhood he assiduously attended the National Cinema where his father, Mimmo Pintacuda, a well-known photographer and figure who inspired Giuseppe Tornatore for the character of Alfredo in “Nuovo Cinema Paradiso,” worked as a projectionist. He is a screenwriter for cinema and winner of numerous awards including, in 2010, the prestigious Franco Solinas Award.
“Maybe this area has produced so many artists precisely because it has undergone a kind of sacrifice of beauty.
Those who make art, perhaps, do so precisely as a reaction to the ugliness that surrounds them.”
Arrigo Musti
Painter
Arrigo Musti is a Sicilian painter born in Palermo in 1969. His works explore deep themes such as myth, corruption of customs, human rights and war. He has called his style “Impop.” Through it he creates seductive images to induce reflection and disorientation in viewers. In 2011 he was chosen at the invitation of the curator for the Venice Biennale by Giuseppe Tornatore. His works are exhibited in museums and collections around the world, he collaborates with Universities and Academies of Fine Arts as an independent researcher.
“Beauty is the meaning of the thing, beauty is a reflection, that’s where I find beauty in that, in the keys to interpretation, which are more interesting sometimes than the work itself”
Ignazio Buttitta
Anthropologist
Ignazio Buttitta, the nephew of the Bagherese poet with the same name, is Full Professor of Demoetnoantropological Disciplines at the University of Palermo where he teaches Anthropology of the Sacred, European Ethnology and Intangible Heritage. He is a research associate of the ISPC/CNR, President of the Buttitta Foundation and the Rector’s delegate for cultural activities.
“Portraying themselves as a community endowed with special intellectual qualities is a way of calming the truth of the matter, that of being one of the island’s many communities ravaged by dramatic contradictions”
Rosario Lentini
Economic Historian
Rosario Lentini (1952) graduated in Political Science at the University of Florence and pursued studies in economic history, devoting his attention to the development of the entrepreneurial bourgeoisie in Sicily, with particular regard to Italian and foreign shopkeeper-bankers. He has published: with Romualdo Giuffrida The Age of the Florios (1985) and the following essays: Economy and History of Sicilyʼs Tuna Farms in Vincenzo Consolo, Tuna Fishing in Sicily (1986); The Presence of the English in the Sicilian Economy, in Raleigh Trevelyan, The Whitaker Story (1988); Wine Sicilies in the 1800s (2019).
“Art is liberation. Only artists can save us from narrowness, misery and failure. If there were no art we would be condemned to brutality, stupidity, and a total inability to appreciate beauty”
