71 But sometimes reality is even more powerful and imaginative than fiction: when Antoni Gaudí designed the Sagrada Familia cathedral he concentrated on just one of the four facades, sensing that time would have not been enough for him but never ceasing to think beyond his own limits. Gaudí imagined a forest of stone, columns like trees, and carried forward the project by fixing a wooden slab to the ceiling, to which he hooked small chains with counterweights at their ends, to understand its load and so that anyone could see the Cathedral even before it was real, looking up, like every time amazement invades us. That Cathedral, imagined real even before being so and built thanks to this visionary impulse, is our UN 2030 Agenda. But if the right to public water is made explicit within the Agenda, the fruition of art is increasingly a private, elitist and mediated fact, in the hands of a system that keeps it away from the street, at the mercy of merchandising, often forcing it to clandestinity, as Marcel Duchamp prophesied in a conference in Philadelphia in 1961: «The great artist of tomorrow will go underground». Sentimentally, just as sentimental has been the education of that child who stumbled upon art and innocently, unconsciously imbued himself with it, within the public/private dichotomy I then ask him what’s his relationship with his artworks, once donated to the public. What becomes of those thirsty ears of wheat, of those petals, of that shipwrecked meteor, of that trip to the moon? «Those works become part of a map», he replies. «A new map. Which gives meaning to the places, but above all to the passages. When they asked me, for example, to create a work for the Scampia subway, I thought of those years. I thought that every day so many kids would have caught those trains to go to school and would have passed in front of my work. Elegia was born with this awareness. And I designed it so that it would have been the reservoir of a thousand possible stories. An empty room, a few elements, perfect pieces of an inner drama that was just waiting to have a visual shore to start gushing. Sometimes I walk by that work and listen to people exchanging ideas about what they see in it. According to some it is the study of a contemporary St. Jerome, for others it is a prison, for still others it is a poor house. In each of these stories, the protagonist is the one who watches. Thus, there it is what becomes of these works. They are devices available to the public. The permanent ones, in addition, have a particular virtue: they are places to which one can return. That's what people tell me. They never tell me: I wanted to see it again. They say: I wanted to go there again. Returning to a place and finding it still there is something that goes beyond a visual experience. It is the manifestation of a home of the soul. You know, I am honoured and happy when I have the opportunity to leave homes of the soul around, to which somebody can return». It is a warming metaphor, the one just evoked by Tosatti of the work of art as a home of the soul, but in his art there is a more recurring metaphor, which does not warm, but indeed it burns: that of the mirror. It is not only the title of one of his most demanding cycles, My heart is a void, the void is a mirror – which, since 2018, is taking him around the world to compose a decadent portrait of an idea of global democracy adrift, in the face of which it is binding and burning to be mirrored in order to be able to imagine a new way of salvation – but it is also the metaphor that Tosatti identifies for himself as an artist: that of a mirror-maker. «The artist has the task of planting a mirror in reality, sharp, like a razor open in the air». The synthetic soul of the mirror, synthetic because it is enclosed within the only synthesis of a frame, allows concentration on the crisis points identified by the artist to definitively, and once again, come to terms with ourselves. But the function of the mirror – which in art must necessarily distance itself from pedestrian descriptions, from an inflated idea of the search for truth that we willingly leave to the chronicle because art is not, with all due respect, reportage – is that of a returnable: «The mirror-maker is not the one who constructs the image that is in the mirror, and what is important in the mirror is the image». And that reflection returned by art, the image, passes through «a process of knowledge and, subsequently, of sharing that knowledge, which requires an overcoming, a dialectic. And it’s not just me doing it, letting myself be invaded by the culture of a place, but the city itself does when I give back, like a wave of return, that entire heritage of knowledge put in a precise frequency, in an order similar to the atomic structure of a blade». A metaphor is capable, as per its etymology – metaphor: derived from the Greek μεταφορά [-ᾶς, ἡ] 1. transport 2. change 3. transfer – of transporting like the sea, of evoking an elsewhere, like the imagination. Of creating powerful icons in front of which to collect and to be recollected, to reflect and to be reflected. By merging my metaphor of art as water with his one of art as mirror, I obtain a mirror of water, and I think that a founding myth of Western culture lives on a mirror of water, precisely that of Narcissus,
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