Basile and His Art

by Annalisa Saccà

Pasquale Basile, who was born in Messina, an moved at a young age to Terracina in Latium, can be cosidered an Hellenic artist.
"Hellenic" in this case, doesn't refer to the classical period of Greek art (V-IV cent.B.C.), rather to the Hellenic Middle Age period (X-IIIV cent.B.C.). This period started with the migration into Greece and later into Magna Grecia (contemporary southern Italy) of the Dores (who came to be Known as Hellenes then), and it is characterized by the geometric style whose highest form of artistic expression culminated in vascular painting.

In Basile though, we don't find that the lekythoi, amphores or vases, whic are typical of vascular painting, are necessary for the artist to convey his pictorial world. These, instead, have been substituted by ligneous canvases which are never rectilinear or confining, but always oblongan shaped ovally as to interrupt and continue a dialogue wuith the pictorial space that goes beyond and outside the physical space of the canvas. This is the case with parts of bodies such as heads, arms and trunks, all cut off (see "Annunciation","The Shell Collectors", The Rape of Venus", "Vulva Lactuca", "Amantis") that presuppose an entirety beyond the ligneous material where they are depicted, denoting thus the space of the absence in which they are realized.

Hellenic for Basile means geometric. It is not just geometry of forms but also geometry of the spirit.

A geometric spirit is one who arranges its own pictorial iconography in such a manner that the distribution of the forms reproduces the rhythm and articulation of an armonic order.

The "Shell Collectors" is such an example. In the ligneous material shaped ovally, the geometric figures of the circle, the triangle are played alternatively. The result is a centerless triangulation composed of three triangular figures whosehead, arms and dressare shaped as triangles, softened by the circular forms of the breast and thighs. These figures are seated around aprobable table that in perspective appears to be a rectangle, and yet viewed bidimensionally is an acephalous triangle balanced by one of the superimposed figures as possibile "head", in harmony with the other two figures on both sides.

It is a refined game of forms, similar to a musical fugue where the elements appear and disappear interlaced in pure harmony.

If Basile's geometric spirits tells of the technique of his work closely related to the Hellenic past, the content of his work catapults the artist into the moder period embodied in a recurrent image used to represent the vicissitudes of the soul: the woman.

The woman in Basile's works is a kind of hyeroglyphic that as in the Egyptian walls, according to the pictographs it relates to, narrates a different event or, as in the case in Basile, tells of the soul itself.

It is a symbol that refers to something other than itself, connoting as it does "the other", embodied in different figures or "disguises" as Vito Apuleo calls them.

The best example of "disguised" women come from the collection of etchings prepared by Basile for Mario Guidotti's book The Center and the Labyrinth. In the female figure tranforms itself continuously through the appropriation of some elements used scenographically to convey a particular meaning.

It is true for the case of the hat and the trumpet/intercome in Fellini, the recurrence of identical form in Echo, the waterfall in Source, the multiple legs in Circle, the deformed shapes in Ship, and the sea in Risk of Shipwreck.

One of most interesting example is the etching entitled Silence.
Here the female body is replaced by the fragment of a fluted column, crowed by the sweet and thinning face of a young woman, resembling the Egyptian queen Nefertiti and the Caryatids of the Erycteus.
Her full hair, flattend at the top to echo a capital, completes the column as if ready to hold an absent weiht.

Finally, the overwhelming presence (it takes more than half of etched space) of a shadowy area above the feminine head, and the absence of the body-word, substituted by the column, contribute to this representation of silence in a naked space, made precious by a delicate necklace that girds with regality the young woman,sneck.

The female figure in Basile,in its bidimensionality of archaic fresco, evokes the Apollonian culture and the same time the atemporal Dyonisian of the soul. The profile, the triangular or circular shape of its hair, parallel to the triangulation of the arms, depicted often in a monoblock with the bust (veil/armour), evoke an ancient divinity, where the breasts suggest the image of mother earth, dispenser of fertility.

And yet if we look at Basile's feminine figure from the waist down, thins change completely. The Dyonisian takes over, loosening the istincts and the dark passions of the soul, in the recurrence of a tempting nakedness "without the flesh" played as the mystery of enchantment.

The game of sexual temptation dispayed is not limited to naked buttocks, but it is accentuated by playful elements such as garters, high hills an pompon, unearthed in a postmodern manner from a tradition encompassing Decadentism, Liberty and Belle Epoque.
(I am thinking of "Lovers" wherethe desire is rendered in the form of a bent leg adorned with garter and high heel shoe upon which sweetly rests the faceless figure of the lover).

Basile, disciple of the Mediterranean tradition, has experimented with different materials. While the etchings hve allowed him to recover an arcaic world ful of mystery, the paintings have given him access to new volumetric tonalities,an his final experiments
with bronze have succeeded in bringing thickness and physicality to his bidimensional figures.

The chromatic presence in Basile's paintings is characterized by the dominance of the ancestral colors of the earth and sea,brown and blue. They are never bright, rather suffused with a pallor as if they had just been coated by the fading of time to insure their atemporality.

In "Offering" for example, the dominating blue marine of the dresses and hair, linear and static, is contrasted with the brown/earth of the body,circular (see buttoks and breast) and mobile, in such a harmonious way as to produce a blending of the two. The final effect is of a delicate sensuality and tenderness expressed iconographically by the gesture of the human figure offering a shell as the erotic fruit of pleasure. Narrator of archetypal forms learned in his native Sicilian land, Basile is today an artist able to link a past disovered in its timelessness, and a present revisited from an archaic perspective.

ARBA SICULA (Journal Of Sicilian Folklore And Litterature)
Modern Foreign Languages and Classical Studies
St.John's University
Jamaica, NEW YORK