Saverio Lucariello

Saverio Lucariello is this kind of hermetic artist. He masters the esoteric virtues of idiocy. He thus multiplies his self-portraits as a kitsch wizard or phantom riding a wheel barrow (Nomadisme glouton et bulimique), attempting object manipulations or speeches of a Cabalistic air, in folkloric costumes with a disco tinge. We1re at the stage of comprehending forms and symbols where the operative temptation first appears. Getting by without a theory or an initiation, Lucariello the wizard wildly undertakes an alchemy of the everyday. Bits of cloth, garden tools, kitchen utensils, or various cold-cuts elsewhere, are arbitrarily considered as so many magic pentacles (Romantique nocturne et mélodique). And it1s through a mocking eye ? which recalls that of Peter Seller's in The Party by Blake Edwards? that the Neapolitan-born shaman, decked out in his acrylic dresses cum togas, observes the events that his powers produce over a more or less long term. But not much happens. All that remains is unmotivated gestures, incoherent declarations, baroque liturgies (Affrontement topographique) choreographically suspended. Lucariello1s terrorist alchemy is a science worthy of the Musée Grévin, a gallery of stylized figures, frozen in their poses like so many formulas deprived of their conclusion, an absolute alchemy which reverts to burlesque rigour and opens up to idiocy as a superior poetic intelligence.

Jean-Yves Jouannais, excerpt from the text Les deux Hermès (the two Hermes), in cat. Saverio Lucariello, Images En Manoeuvres Éditions, Marseilles, 2000