DrIFTwOOD

Text by: Paola Ciana Negretti

La stanza del Vento has always hosted artists, painters, sculptors and writers with a connection to our territory: the promontory of Caprione, a wooded land next to the sea, surrounded by unique mountains. The exhibition seeks to present both new and established artists who devote their talent to bring out the best of, and are inspired by, natural materials and nature itself. Luigi Camarilla with his outstanding Mediterranean Altars enters the scene as a major protagonist amongst those artists that dedicate their work to nature, using driftwood recovered from the shore. I am delighted that he has agreed to land in our exhibition his ‘wrecks’, which have been transformed into painted poetic sculptures, thus binding together the sea and the wind; a light and genorous wind that I hope will always be favourable.

To better understand the “Mediterranean Altars” of Luigi Camarilla exhibited at la Stanza del Vento, it is necessary to mention the artist main project from which this artworks derives: “The Pilgrimage of love, from passion to consciuosness”, de ned by the writer Vincenzo Consolo as “…a poetic and narrative poem”. It is an inseparable body of 32 works each consisting of an altar made up of wooden planks and fragments of the boats of mediterranean shermen.They are votive structures representing a pilgrimage of love, a spiritual journey of the artist through mythology and ancient civilisations. Installations of this altars has been exhibited on the staircase of european cities, it is worth to mention the installation on S. Maria del Monte staircase in Caltagirone in 2005. “A vertical journey from personal passion to the collective consciousness of a necessary spirit of love,” as the artist himself describe it. Unlike the 32 mediterranean altars which cannot be separated one from the other because they are conceived as a “corpus unicum”, this ones showed La Stanza del Vento, belong to a work in progress project and have the task to scatter around just like ancient troubadours, giving testimony of the existence of the Pilgrimage of love.

Born in Ortygia, Syracuse, in 1959, he has then trained in Milan. After having attended the art school, a series of work experience begin. He works as scenographer and addresses his creativity to applied arts and writing where he can better espress his ecletic vocation. In 1996, in order to experience creativity free from any in uence and dependancy, he retired for three years in the land of his origins, Sicily. There in front of the mythological sea of Stromboli and inside of Etna’s lava woods, he starts to work on a big artistic project which he names “Meditarranean Altars – Pilgrimage of love” in which painting, sculpture and writing are blended. Since then his espressive research becomes more and more characterized with antropological spirit and oriented towards mediterranean subject and civil responsability such as the current issues of migrations of people and the coexistence between cultures.