Summary: | This study examines the relationships between recent works by Francesco Arena, Luigi Presicce and Raffaele Quida by adopting varied perspectives: a geographical and cultural feeling of belonging to the same land, a philosophically and politically connoted sense of friendship and a specific idea of landscape that makes one's land of origin into a thematic mainspring. Dominating the background are the figures of Carmelo Bene and Pino Pascali, who made that same land an elective place of the spirit, in a praxis capable both of taking root and deterritorialising itself, of embodi-ment and dematerialisation, nipping any localist drift in the bud, harmoni-sing the mathematical-symbolic lucidity and esotericism of Frederickian culture with the imaginative and material opulence of a Baroque sensibility. An exploration of the twofold approach to landscape that links the work of the three artists here examined – one a process of interiorisation, the other of objectification – yields insights into this contemplative terrain.
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