Piero Guccione and Leonardo Sciascia, images of a friendship
(by Marzia Apice) Peeking into the plots of the friendship that linked two great Sicilian intellectuals, consolidated over the years through pictorial art and the literary thought, discover the most private feelings and from there broaden one's gaze to include reflections on historical and political context, the contradictions and the beauty of a unique island in the world: it will open on May 24th at the Convent of Carmine di Marsala the exhibition "Piero Guccione - Leonardo Sciascia. Pictorial chronicle of a friendship", edited by Sergio Troisi. Produced by the Contemporary Painting Exhibition Institution "City of Marsala" was born from an idea of the Piero Archive Guccione, the exhibition presents to the public about 50 works by Guccione, among oil paintings, pastels and drawings from private collections from all over Italy, introduced by the prefaces written by Sciascia (1921-1989) for some exhibitions and publications of the artist in the seventies and eighties. In this counterpoint between visual art and words, precisely for document the almost twenty-year friendship between the two intellectuals, there is also space for a dozen letters along the route autographs, selected from a large and fascinating correspondence, composed of letters, postcards and tickets. Finally, the exhibition, which will remain open until October 19, also wants to pay homage to Giuseppe Leone (1936-2024), the great photographer from Ragusa who passed away a year ago and friend of Guccione and Sciascia: ten shots on display that portray the landscape of the Iblei, subject of an exhibition at the gallery "La "Palette" of Palermo at the end of 1984 dedicated to the relationship between painting and photography and suggested by the writer himself Racalmuto. As the curator Troisi writes in a note, Guccione - of whom This year marks the 90th anniversary of his birth (1935-2018) - and Sciascia "shared many things, as well as a shy temperament and a taciturn nature: friendships, in particular with Giuseppe Leone, the great photographer from Ragusa recently deceased who was the architect of their meeting, city - Rome and especially Paris, frequented and loved by both -, obviously Sicily, its controversial historical condition just like the landscape that unfolds from Agrigento to the Iblean plateau, which Guccione and Sciascia cross in a direction or the other, and which often serves as a backdrop to their partnership". "From a position refractory towards of abstraction and in general of the experimentalism of avant-garde - explains Troisi - Sciascia looked at the work of Guccione as a reference and an opportunity for verification of his own critical exercise in the field of figurative arts, with a tension between representation and reality that in the past he identified in Antonello, in Caravaggio or even in Pietro D'Asaro, the Monocle of Racalmuto, some crucial examples".
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