The works that I am exhibiting here today are the result of an experience that I have been dragging along for over seventy years. They are the image of an adolescence lived in the great spaces of my land.
The <chiarone> that illuminates the deepest history of Etruria shines in my memory like an intoxication vIssed and suffered. The centuries-old oaks, cork oaks, holm oaks, and farnias of the great woods of Tuscania still drip with dew, the woodpecker, magpie, blackbirds, robins, and furafratta still move their fresh leaves, and a subtle whistle makes music in the night lived lying, covered by a canopy.
O my Lord, how many times have I invoked you during the night as the north wind hummed in my alert and awake ear and the chill tormented my limbs. Have you ever imagined a fearful and frightened child struggling to open his eyelids because he does not know what it will next glimpse? The dog Drago kept me company, and my mare kept on a halter in the trunk of the turkey oak tree waited for me to ride her.
The first dawns gradually brightened more and more the spaces of a boundless universe. And so it was that mad with joy and full of affection, and full of images, and full of mysterious and elusive dreams, I pushed on into the great valleys of my country.
When I was just a teenager, I walked the Via Clodia, the road traversed by so many figures from every time and every era, such as Charlemagne who raised his banner on the watchtower of the hill of San Pietro in Tuscia, the Via Clodia that brought the Renaissance to Rome... The via Clodia led me to Giotto, Beato Angelico, Paolo Uccello, and Piero della Francesca. They were my companions and teachers.
I found myself one day in Venice. I stayed there for a long time, teaching, dreaming, working and creating.
Then I went beyond the Alps. I met and loved Matisse and Braque. Those are the stairs to heaven.... I traveled the length and breadth of France, Normandy, Camargue, Ile de France, Auvergne, and I could write <I am a timeless Etruscan, I discovered in the gray stone the Gauls' lair>.
Now, years, a lifetime later, I have brought the last white bulls that rise solemnly in a space of blues, of greens, of tactile tones, of vibrant ratios of ashes and burnt earth. And if I have also given space to the gourds, it is to cry out to us humans, through their <revolt>, to no longer disturb nature beyond the endurance it allows.
Galloping toward the 90th year of age. Dear friends, contemplate them, these white bulls before the light goes out.
Giuseppe Cesetti
