NewWorld Artists Biaggi and Porfiri

BEAUTY AND TRUTH

by Paolo Palamara

To stay in front of the work of an artist is, at best, often difficult. Through the work, before any analysis of technique and style, he asks us to pay attention to what is being communicated; the artist’s relationship with the totality of life is all there. A glance at his work obliges us to move past the suggestiveness of the immediate impression, to dig, to perceive the human drama, which, through every single brush stroke, pencil touch, broad knife stroke, hammer shot, enters the heart of the work so that it might be, first of all, true. Beauty without truth does not exist. Our lives are not changed by something fake, even if it comes in a sweet and tender form.

All of this, for the artist’s part, becomes that much more difficult when it is the fruit of the work of two people who, in order to communicate to us, must, above every contrast, every instinct of self-affirmation, abandon themselves to what unites, to what gives and actually IS the meaning.
Last year the CEI (Italian Episcopal Conference) chose the artistic design created by Rachele Biaggi and Alessia Porfiri for the pectoral cross of the Bishops and high prelates who had offered their contribution and cooperation to the work of the CEI during the course of 2004. Rachele and Alessia explained: “This work is the result of cooperation, a fusion of experiences and reflection on art, on the Church, and on our relationship with Christ. The true apex of our work is our vocation, our intimate and true relationship with Christ and His Church.”

They described the fruit of their collaboration. “The Cross itself is modeled in silver with gold drops–a sign of God’s ‘Gloria in Crucis’–and it is rendered through the microfusion of wood to recall the Bishop’s sense of pastoral work. The Cross stands on a small silver plate on which the figures of Saint Francis and Saint Catherine of Siena stand to recount the millenary history of holiness of the Church in Italy. The slim yet energetic Cross is at once charged with the absence of Christ and sings the Glory of the resurrected One. It is a vibration of light that unveils, reveals, and regenerates like the Easter dawn: ‘by His wounds we were healed.’ Light is the crucial aspect of this work: it breaks through and redeems the two almost longed-for figures of the saints who, lightly touched by the rays, stand strong while firmly holding a shining book, witness of the Word that has become man. Natural light, passing under the Cross and above the plate, runs through the gaps between the arms of the Cross and the bar holding high the head of the Cross that seems to support the other elements. Yet this last aspect is merely an illusion, because in reality around the thin bar there is only air, or, better, there is breath and space, lightness and elevation. Instead, it is the Cross that supports everything–the bar, the banner–and justifies everything.

Everything is for This, everything is justified through This. Regeneration begins from the Cross, on which the blood of Christ was shed. Out of the Cross buds the gold of victory.”