Emilio Isgrò (1937) - Sans titre

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

This is a distinctive trait for this serigraph printed in only 40 copies, making it a unique piece in the painterly cycle of the maestro, who usually either erases the word entirely or leaves it visible; here we have the addition of the "shading of the erasure".

Emilio Isgrò, with erasure, was a great precursor of signaling the devaluation and decay of the word, of language, of the value that words hold, a phenomenon we are living today more than ever.
The maestro began to denounce in 1964 what is now daily, plausible; we note this lack of value of the word, understood as a vehicle-bearing object of ideas, declineable in all its forms, from television debates, to printed news, to dissemination by the mass media, and in the ever-smaller reading society that we are creating.
Fewer words, less culture in circulation, but this, beyond critical discourse on art, what does it mean socially?
The capacity to reason, and I would add the capacity to reason with a critical and proper thought, is dictated by the quantity and quality of the vocabularies a person possesses; we cannot think beyond the words we know, as one cannot build a house without all the necessary materials, the more material is missing the less complete, stable, implementable the house will be.
By limiting words one also limits the concepts one can create and the ability to express them or express oneself.
Understood the axiom that fewer words equal fewer thoughts, Isgrò’s work takes on an extremely high cultural and artistic value.
Concealing words behind erasure is a way for the maestro to spark curiosity in the viewer of the work, a way to urge us to explore beneath the word, to imagine what might be in relation to what is left "free" to be read.
A conceptual, discovery-driven process, of inquiry, of reflection on words and their arrangement, almost as if Isgrò assumed the pedagogical role of a teacher, as well as that of an intellectual.
But Isgrò is not only a “teacher”; he is also a creator of new syntactic and formal rules, a developer of new stories, but also a keen satirist. The maestro is what an intellectual should be—a "reviver of consciences."
Emilio Isgrò thus places himself in the history of art as a guardian of the word and, by extension, of culture, a fundamental role that we increasingly need.

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 the certificate of authenticity.