An Historic Man

The Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Reggio Calabria hosts an exhibition on Marcello Sèstito's work: drawings on bread paper, tracing 35 years of creative activity.

Marcello Sèstito is not simply an architect who draws, and does do exceedingly well and with a compulsive and engaging continuity.

He is an artist in the true sense of the word who – as well as being an architect with outstanding creative skills – has proven over time to possess profound and original critical qualities. Add to all this the fact that he is a professor of architecture and, indeed, long considered a master.

“In Carta di Pane. Architetture 1980 – 2013”, Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Reggio Calabria

He is also an atypical artist. In a certain sense, in him we see the artist-scientist who places Futurism, metaphysics, Surrealism, Dadaism, precise references to urban architecture, carefully picked resonances of Italian Radical Architecture, his instinctive, fluent and mysterious sign, an imagination that spawns, virtually unaided, figures, forms and colours, a strong theoretical aptitude to identify the issues that have to be addressed and resolved, research seen as a spiritual exercise part St Ignatius and part Yukio Mishima and an intuitive memory that even remembers what has never happened, but that was desired and feared, and in fascinating and Borges-like encyclopaedic tones, all at the service of imagery.

When I think of the mind that is the focus of my comments – by the way, someone I have known and associated with for nearly 40 years now as he was one of my first students at the Faculty of Architecture in Reggio Calabria (at that time, more simply, the Istituto Superiore di Architettura) – I cannot but conjure up an extraordinary Wunderkammer filled with an unfathomable multiplicity of elements, arranged in variegated layers.

Elements all indissolubly interwoven as a result of unpredictable metamorphoses, fused one with the other, and, at the same time, capable of isolating themselves from the context by their absolute individuality, arranged on several semantic levels to construct a narrative mosaic with several different paths of interpretation.

The thematic universe of Marcello Sèstito – who was a friend, pupil and interlocutor of Eugenio Battisti, Pierre Restany, Antonio Quistelli, Renato Nicolini, Alessandro Anselmi and other leading artists and intellectuals, Italian and non-, as well as of the great travellers of the Grand Tour who discovered his Calabria, first and foremost Edward Lear – incorporates the cosmos, geography with its natural and cultural secrets, legend with its fabulous and often disturbing contents, the mineral, vegetable, organic, mechanical and virtual worlds, physiognomy, the history of art and all the architecture ever devised and yet to be invented. In short, Marcello Sèstito’s art feeds on reality but also, and perhaps predominantly, on a supra- or parallel reality in which the invisible becomes visible.

“In Carta di Pane. Architetture 1980 – 2013”, Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Reggio Calabria. Vista dell’allestimento

Taking brief and small steps inside Marcello Sèstito’s work gives an insight into some particularly valuable and remarkably intense dialectic contrasts.

The first is the conflictual relationship between finite and infinite, in which the form is split between the desire to result in something complete and the aspiration to construct itself beyond all limits, constantly being reborn out of itself.

The second is the antagonistic relationship between the unified whole and the fragment. In one sense, this results in a prevailing interest in the entirety of the form and, in another, a predominance of the inclination to display the form’s components as a system of separate entities.

The third is the contrast between a list-like approach to composition and a summarising intention by which things do not reveal their constituent materials, although they do allude cryptically to genetic taxonomies.

The fourth and most decisive dialectic contrast sees a struggle between the modern and the ancient in a sort of war with no holds barred. The modern is the outcome of the ancient but, equally, it is what, in an inversion of time, defines and legitimates the ancient.

This veritable magic that overturns all precedence does not surprise me just as, I am sure, it does not surprise any of those who have, for years, followed the inspired and assiduous research of Marcello Sèstito, who is, above all, we should remember, a historic man.

For this simple reason, he always manages to see something new as the most advanced and astounding locus of knowledge and invention.

A poetically perceived new that has a utopian force, an extreme space of innovation that the artist of the works in this book has successfully explored, finding new and uncommon themes as well as unexpected beauty, guided in this “adventure of ideas and languages” by the prophetic wisdom of his fellow countryman Tommaso Campanella and the enlightened and estranging spirit of the already mentioned Eugenio Battisti.