carlo franza

N. 5/2000

Carlo Franza

Mimmo Camassa A young Apulian artist, Mimmo Camassa (born in Bari in 1964), and living in Tricase in the Low Salento, where he works in an art laboratory of his, different from so many imitators that paint ladies on imitation of renown fashion magazines (presuming to pass themselves off as artists whereas they are not), left us really surprised by the primitive virtues of this ideal and concrete sequence of icons. He is an artist of icons, already famous after a severe apprenticeship at the Saint Scolastica Institute of Bari with Professor Tony Bux, and reediting at the end of the '900, that wonderful experience brought by monks from the East in the land of Apulia around the year 1000 and leaving in those “God's caves” an extraordinary and unique trace of mysticism, of Byzantine iconography, of art sui generis. And just when the whole contemporaneous art, today, is affected by the lack of creativity and novelty, since movements and groups have deconsecrated beauty as a natural entity, here it is Camassa that draws, in an innovative way, his example from the great iconographic tradition of the middle age, and reediting the icons, and mainly developing a whole novel of martyrology, within which different Saints surface to tell their lives. On temperas coloured and golden-background paintings, Camassa succeeds in reviving, by a very personal way, Saints and Madonna. There's the Three-Hand Virgin, Saint Michel, Saint Nicolas, Mary Mother of God, Saint Joseph, Saint Isidor, Saint Peter, a numberless set of Patriarchs and Fathers of the Church. Patron Saints of the East and the West, the Pantocrator Christ, Mother and Queen Madonna, all is painted with brilliant colours, bright as the fixed glimpse of the represented sacred images, a glimpse lived by big eyes that interpret the bible history. Miraculous images that renew the miracle of painting, images standing time and history, and that motivate the life of all men and populations, believers or not; Camassa leads any spectator to the primitive wisdom, to that sage discovering that embodies in the golden background and that means light. Reds, greens, whites translate into painting an eastern Christian history. Camassa, here in Apulia renews the miracle of time and the strong technique of the ancient monks that wrote and painted for years the supernatural. Our young artist has held many exhibitions in Apulia, in several towns, without crossing the regional limits. But Camassa is more worthy than his fellow countrymen believe or estimate. He's an artist as few are, very refined and learned; to the contemporaneous sacred he gives a precious history.