Nessun uomo e' un'isola: un polittico per Casimiro
Home > Cycles > No Man is an Island: a Polyptych for Casimiro (Text by Alberto Benini)
PROLOGUE AND EXPLANATION
At the end of 2003 I have had to Luisa the drafts of the biography, still unfinished, of Casimiro
(Casimiro Ferrari, the last king of Patagonia, Baldini Castoldi Dalai, 2004) for per to make some drawings to illustrate Miro's dreams.
But she has slipped into the folding of the book, with eyes so different from those of the others and she has managed to arrive with eight portraits of characters that was living for different reasons (teachers, friends, mates) between those pages.
Now it is up to me to get the occasion to slip into per drawings made of light transparencies and try to say with words what she has managed to read and find. Paradoxes and singular privilege for me being visitor of my papers, as paradox approach is her to portraits because she is not a portrait painter, that treats the faces as the would be mountains, clouds, rocks.
What might be the tale of a man's history, it has changed,
little by little, into the history of those who have crossed their own lives with his.
And so, for everyone: "No man is an island, entire of itself"..
Each of the characters and of the places that have contributed to tell Casimiro's history has left a trace, little or big, stressed or more discreet in the tale, mixing her history to that of the protagonist of the biography. In the end making true John Donne's sentence, put by Hemingway on the door of one of the books of my adolescence:
"No man is an Island, entire of itself. (.) Therefore,
send not to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee".
RICCARDO CASSIN
"Look, Riccardo, it resembles the Walker" says the legend that the mates had said to their chief-expedition seeing a photo of the Jirishanca, upon which in a few days Casimiro would have expressed his character of "jefe". This is the reason for the Peruvian colossus looks at the Grandes Jorasses of the Walker spur. In the saddle between the two mountains the face of Riccardo Cassin appears, the "great old man" that taught concreteness to whom had climbed with him, to aim straight to what one wants. Riccardo transfigures into the appearance of an Indian chief, back from battles with all his own warriors still alive in spite of all past dangers.
Below, a hidden face in a tree trunk refers to the search of his father's grave, father never known. In the plate, there appear: Mary Varale, the woman who gave to the "Lecchesi" the keys of the great alpinism and the Guglia Angelina, the first climb of Riccardo. The hummingbird, that seems to stop his own flight near the great alpinist, refers to the nickname of the Andean mountain: "Hummingbird beak of the Andes".
CARLO MAURI (BIGIO)
The face of Carlo Mauri (Bigio) is still at the centre of the draw. The mountains rotate around him, wrapping him up in the water and the wind to bring him towards one of his many trips. Over him, Sarmiento, the mountain destined to reveal the way to South America to the alpinists from Lecco. Under mount Buckland, the first foreign Casimiro's climbing , the start of his own falling in love for the mountains of the extreme South of the world. Very small, climbed up on the mountain slopes (mountain than is named from the English geologist that proposed a theory of Earth's making through a row of cataclysms), Father De Agostini, the Salesian priest that has brought the "Ragni" there, creating a sort of imaginary bridge, but real, one that binds men and mountains, that passes over channels and fiords in constant storm... The condor suggests the "Bigio's flying high", to the fortitude of his dreams.
GIUSEPPE ALIPPI (DET)
"If I was a painter, the Cerro Don Bosco would be my masterpiece": this once said Giuseppe Alippi (Det). So, Luisa makes emerge his head just from the Don Bosco. Behind him, the wonderful North-West wall of the Cerro Piergiorgio rises, Casimiro's unfinished dream. The one Miro had decided to dream with Det, the last of the alpinists of a race now facing extinction, a wizard of the great walls. "And may each of your desires remain a desire" writes Hugo Pratt, the father of Corto Maltese. And the blackboard stays there, and as Luisa said, "others will write their own histories. And also Casimiro remains there, chasing the romantic Patagonia in his heart, the stubborn cigarette in his mouth and the look that is lost far and far away". From the little cemetery of Punta del Lago towards his mountain: "I must cut that tree: it hides the Torre.". Behind him, the wooden pony that , when he was a baby, stared looking at and dreaming - perhaps - a future as a gaucho..
BENVENUTO LARITTI
The one of Benvenuto Laritti is a tragic destiny that crosses with the one of Casimiro only for few terrible minutes, at the base of Cerro Murallon, the Marmolada of Patagonia. Only an earthquake could undermine Ben from the mountain: he could get lost in a thousand ways, surely not falling by the rocks. His own is a "announced death". He always said that he'd have died before he was thirty. There will be Casimiro's young mates to dedicate the vertical tower that rises over the roof of the Murallon, the mountain that Casimiro won at the third try, winning with her (by her?) his own illness. The mountain that Luisa extends diagonally and triplicate in the plate, to occupy a great deal of it. Hidden, in an arch of branches, the Salvanel, the spirit of the Dolomites to whom Benvenuto has dedicated his last way, it is there awaiting to bring Ben in the Land of Middle. Vanishing, almost invisible, the Marmolada is just visible, to suggest a recall to those Dolomites that are the real Ben's mountains and where also Casimiro had learned "the great mountains"..
WALTER BONATTI
Behind Walter Bonatti there is a Patagonia of great distances, horizontal dimension, that dimension into which he can enter only after having conquered and won by himself and in winter, the North wall of the Cervino, going out from the world of the vertical adventure to gain of the other dimension of travelling, the one of the explorers he dreamt of in his own adolescence and that has always followed through all his life. An horizontal dimension seen in the long crest of the Cordon Moreno, where Walter, with Bigio, has begun to know Patagonia. An horizontal extraordinary run, started after the two men understood there was not time to win the Cerro Torre. And so, Patagonia, a land where the word exploration still has a meaning, in which Walter walks with his companion in a dimension without time, anachronistically wished. He also, just like Casimiro, has desired it against evidences, against the progress, the passing of the time... The Patagonia earth, ice and flying birds, that shape the search for freedom, upon which Walter dominates, king of a splendid loneliness.
PINO NEGRI
Coming up on the Cerro Torre top, just after Casimiro, Mario e Daniele, was Pino Negri. Pino on that peak, after days of fatigues and overwhelming tensions, has invented a gesture of extraordinary simplicity and sensibility: he took off his red Ragni sweater and put it on the snowman built by his own mates. A symbol to bring the other mates on the top conquered with the effort of everyone, and together the inscription of the "rocky scream" to the group of the Ragni of the Grignetta.Pino, that climbed with Casimiro in winter upon the North face of the Badile, upon the fragile towers of the Grigna, till the heart of Monte Bianco and in the wonderful snow channels of one of the most beautiful mountains in the world: the Alpamayo. Pino, making an abstract of his extraordinary work of alpine aide, to which alludes the flying of the helicopter in the sky in the painting, used to say: "We have never left anybody around". And then, looking at your face, to check you were listening: "Or not?".
CASIMIRO FERRARI
"Ustedes ganaron el Torre y no tienen nada que pagar"
At the centre of the polyptych no one can be but him: el jefe Casimiro Ferrari: his hat is the Corna di Medale, upon which he, young boy, is climbing. But his forehead has become transparent to let be crossed by flocks of birds which are thoughts and dreams. From the Cordon Moreno, lost in the background, the shapes emerges of Fitz Roy, San Lorenzo, Cerro Torre, the Falcon fiord , with the ship of the Riso Patron enterprise and two ironic penguins, lone, symbolic spectators of such solitude.
Down, in a tangle of Patagonian beeches shaped by wind, the legends of Patagonia and pieces of Miro's history have made the nest: the wooden pony that, perhaps, still is hidden behind the rusty shutter of an old shop, the cow with the cut udders, the viejita and her son don Pedro Alvorsen and the sheep with whom Casimiro and his mates have eaten at the end of the Torre's siege. The pictures of the cueva de las manos, a family of indios Tehuelche and the old Indian of the legend about the little birds.
Never, like here, wild is "destroyer and preserver" and so keeps together all those natural and human elements. And the tales of men that fight until the die (and after the death) to try to be free. Men that history may win, but that go towards the "White lakes of silence" leaving a trace of them.
LORENZO MAZZOLENI
When the work was almost finished, the musketeer of the Gruppo Ragni left forever on the K2 came down in silence during the night from the rocks of his and Casimiro's Medale, that in the portrait caresses with his left cheek to become the eight piece of the polyptych. Lorenzo Mazzoleni with his irresistible strength had perhaps simply decided that he wanted to be also him, he that with Casimiro had tried without success the West of Makalu. Lorenzo has come back to the Sarmiento with other mates to climb the West peak (the one that Bigio had neglected thirty years before) to celebrate the forty anniversary of the Gruppo Ragni. Lorenzo, still almost a boy in that expedition, look at us from the portrait, a Lorenzo in love with girls and mountains surrounding him: from K2 to Makalu, from Sarmieno, to Aconcagua another mountain where his way had crossed, at a distance, the one of the jefe.
PROLOGUE AND EXPLANATION
The day I brought Luisa those drafts, in the tiny house under the Medale where she lived, I discovered that she lived near Casimiro's birthplace. I remember a magic afternoon, some months before, at the beginning of the work with Giovanni Ratti that told me and Francesca about old Rancio when Casimiro was a baby.. And then went out walking through those paths, between stone walls. It was finishing to rain and he had pointed the house..
Still another coincidence?
(Alberto Benini)
Nessun uomo è un'isola: un polittico per Casimiro (No Man is an Island: a Polyptych for Casimiro):
8 tables medium and big format
11 big panels "Cerro Torre" - Acrylic (RAGNI GRIGNETTA).
1 engraving CERRO TORRE (RAGNI GRIGNETTA).
