Biography
Possible Ninfa
Ninfa, the town lost in the swamp since the Middle Ages and rediscovered as a garden in the 900s, is the point of departure in Patrizio Marafini’s latest artistic research.
The place where the landscape meets, and is interwined with, people’s lives in an enchanted balance, is full of reflections and deep resonances. Nature, history and different epochs are blended in this mutable small territory, surrounded by water, covered by remote sounds and by the steps of ancient and modern travellers. It is not surprising that Ninfa becomes a homeland for the soul of those who have once visited, and lived, it. As ancient ruins of towers and churches rise in the vegetation, telling their stories; as rare plants and the most delicate flowers, cared by human hands, illuminate the wild nature of the place generating beauty; so the echoes of this enchanted “Hortus conclusus” emerge in the voices of poets and artists, creating new images, new towns and new gardens, new “Possible Ninfas”.
On this occasion, written words and graphic images speak together, to create the image of another possible Ninfa: a short journey to listen to the voice of this mysterious town (which is called after a woman, who is perhaps a goddess) and look towards new horizons.
Wandering around freely, let us follow the course of a transparent shallow river, which nourishes a developing poetic path which takes its inspiration from nature.
The path starts from this place, which is real, but it soon loses its way in new territories created by memories and suggestions, by the words of the poets and of the artist who accompanies them.
The mythical generating power is thus enlivened by the place where, from the mutable encounter of land and water, new visions are generated and released.
Four poems that originated from here are Patrizio Marafini’s travelling companions: “Viaggio a Ninfa con B” by Libero de Libero, “Ninfa” by Philippe Jaccotet, “Ninfa rivisitata” by Giorgio Bassani, “Ora che la cometa è passata” by Leone D’Ambrosio.
In all of them the echo of the path walked along resounds; the experience of a unique “hic et nunc”; the search for the awareness and the lasting of a process of unexpected revelations; happy steps that need to be set free from the limitations of unreliable perception, from the deceit of consumed trivial things, from the wear of the passing of the time; a journey to different places and different worlds that can be delineated and consecrated only through the poetic word.
The walk with “B” is among familiar villages and deep domestic roots: Libero de Libero refers to ponds, birds, reassuring trees and “campi ricordati” (remembered fields).
But the well-known horizon stretches in an endless and mysterious natural landscape, populated by living creatures: “non basta un canto alla strada del bosco”.
Marafini renders its recognizable profile through a concise graphic sign; but the nervous scratch marks suggest the changeable developing of a mutable landscape, as if sketched by the flowing of water. Above all things the deepness of a wide heavy sky which reflects, unsettling, the floating of the unknown.
Jaccotet’s Ninfa, instead, is a place not still inhabited by ancient deities, but by real noisy people, living their everyday life: it is also a surprising setting for encounters, which are so unexpected and evanescent to be perhaps similar to dreams.
The mythical pastoral nature and the evident classical eternity of the place enhance the incessant passing of the time, of the moments, of the people, that collapse, devoured by a catastrophic feeling of loss and emptiness.
In the corresponding engraving, quick ascending lines cross the space over a motionless town, struck by daylight. A stain in the foreground, a dark chasm, works as a separation from the pacified image of the village, suggesting arduous paths, unexplored depths and unbridgeable distances.
Giorgio Bassani meets his Ninfa, “revisited” after a long time, recognizing it in an exotic plant which, in the elegant secluded loneliness of an “orto italiano”, has released its sumptuous wild nature: a desirable but overabundant beauty, proud, intimidating. A tree, a woman perhaps, or maybe a wild beast. The poet’s powerful poetic verbal dynamism regains its strength in Marafini’s vision, where everything is sucked into a vortex. The gestural component of the image is barely detained from opening like an “eye of the storm” over the sight of the ruins of the town. Ninfa is the central point from where quick vertiginous signs originate. From there wide spaces open up, even in the small size of the engraving.
Finally, Leone D’Ambrosio’s meditative, slow journey in the places he knows and loves; the place where the poet finds again, in the unchanged charm of the stream, the benevolent Ninfa that soothes the urge of the days and the seasons, feeds souls and animals, gives voice and time to living creatures, connects modern landscapes to the arcane solemnity of nature and the universe.
Patrizio Marafini’s vision is almost an evening idyll: Ninfa seems to be cradled by the wavy profile of the Lepini Mountains, touched by the sea, covered by a wide motionless sky, lost in thoughts of distant serenity. The visit is over, the comet has passed, but the ancient goddess remains in the untouchable garden of memory.
Patrizio Marafini here confronts the literary language but, at the same time, he keeps his distance. His work is not an academic transposition of the verbal expression into visual images; even if there is a subtle game of analogies and resonances between written text and images, the artist does not simply follow the path suggested by the poet. On the contrary, he makes the poetic words enlighten his research for his own “Possible Ninfa”, starting from immediate and primary gestural impulses, just hinted by a poetic line, an atmosphere, a reflection.
For this reason his subject, the small town lost in vegetation, appears isolated, seen from a distance, in an extreme visual synthesis. Marafini seems to be looking for that detachment from reality that leads to the creation of an independent image, almost abstracted but vital and strong. The means chosen, the engraving, with its necessary technical steps, its superimpositions, actions whose outcome is only partially predictable, the decanting time after the initial graphic impulse, fosters the process of filtering the vision and develop an autonomous visual outcome.
From the tender intimacy with Ninfa as it is recreated by poetry, from the sensorial knowledge of the place, from the emotion of the direct experience, Patrizio Marafini defines the range of the possibilities and of the evocations: in a free, powerful and personal distillation his engraved Possible Ninfa is generated, essential and bright.
Giovanna Aragozzini
