Emilio Isgrò (1937) - Sans titre

The most experienced collectors and connoisseurs will notice an incredibly rare peculiarity in this work by master Emilio Isgró: the shading of the erasure, these words left only partially visible for those who are attentive and curious.

This is a distinctive trait for this serigraph printed in only 40 copies, which makes it a unique piece in the painterly cycle of the master, who usually either erases the word completely or leaves it visible; here we have the addition of the “shading of the erasure.”

Emilio Isgró, with erasure, was a great precursor of informing about the devaluation and decay of the word, of language, of the value that words hold—an phenomenon that today, more than ever, we are experiencing. The master began to denounce in 1964 what is now commonplace, likely, we note this lack of value of the word, understood as an object that conveys ideas, drawable in all its forms, from television debates, to issues in newspapers, to dissemination by the mass media and in the increasingly smaller reading society we are creating. Less words, less culture in circulation, but beyond critical discussions about art, what does this mean socially? The ability to reason, and I would add the ability to reason with a critical and own thought, is dictated by the quantity and quality of vocabulary a person possesses; we cannot think beyond the words we know, just as one cannot build a house without all the necessary material—the more the material is lacking, the less complete, stable, and feasible the house will be.

By limiting words, one also limits the concepts one can create and the capacity to express them or to express oneself. Including the axiom that fewer words mean fewer thoughts, Isgró’s work takes on a very high cultural and artistic value.

To conceal words behind erasure is a method by which the master arouses the viewer’s curiosity, a way to urge us to explore beneath the word, to imagine what might be related to what is left “free” to be read. A conceptual, exploratory process, a search, an inquiry, a reflection on words and their arrangement, almost as if Isgró were adopting the pedagogical role of a teacher, as well as that of an intellectual.

But Isgró is not only a “teacher”; he is also a creator of new syntactic and formal rules, a developer of new stories, yet also a keen satirist. The master is what an intellectual should be—a “reviver of consciences.” Emilio Isgró thus places himself in the history of art as a guardian of the word and, by extension, of culture—an essential role that we increasingly require.

The dimensions of the work are 80 x 60 cm.

The edition number may not correspond to the number of the photograph.

The provenance of the work is from the Grafica Manzoni gallery, which issues its certificate of authenticity.