Emilio Isgrò (1937) - Sans titre

The most seasoned collectors and connoisseurs will notice an incredibly rare peculiarity in this work by master Emilio Isgrò: 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 serigraphy, produced 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, instead, the addition of the "shading of the erasure".

Emilio Isgrò, with erasure, was a great precursor of signaling the devaluation and the decay of the word, of language, of the value that words possess, a phenomenon that today we are experiencing more than ever.
The master began to denounce as early as 1964 what is now commonplace, plausible; we note this lack of value of the word, understood as a vehicle object of ideas, which can be declined in all its forms, from television debates, to paper news, to dissemination by the mass media and in the increasingly smaller reading society we are creating.
Fewer words, less culture circulating, 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 personal 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 materials, the more material is missing, the less complete, stable, and feasible the house will be.
By limiting words, we also limit the concepts one can create and the ability to express them or to express oneself.
Understood the axiom of fewer words equal fewer thoughts, Isgrò’s work takes on a very high cultural and artistic value.
Concealing words behind erasure is a way for the master to arouse curiosity in the viewer of the work, a way to urge us to explore beneath the word, to imagine what might exist in relation to what is left “free” to be read.
A conceptual, discovery-driven process of investigation and 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 careful satirist. The master 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 photograph number.

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