Luigi Carluccio, when
reviewing an exhibition of Victorio Sodo's work in Turin, pointed out
certain affinities of expression in the pronouncements of the artist from
Lecce with certain colourful intricate designs of the informal tradition
and spacialism, comparing those kneaded forms with a new tension of lucid
narrative. He continued minimizing in short, what to Carluccio appeared
to be a "disinterest for reality of time and place". Evidently, the allusion
to this inclination of Victorio So
do,
for this imprint, however despairing, however pessimistic, that was for
the art of images, the root in which were the discoveries on the part
many young Italian artists, of Bacon and Giacometti, masters that even
Sodo had certainly studied and loved. It was a way of emerging from the
narrowness of generic figuration, of optimism, even of a lacerated expression
in which, to so many artists, remained enclosed, associating themselves
at the same time with the dogmatic antithesis between realism and abstraction.
Sodo, emerged from the provincial Lecce, placed himself in accord with
the poetry of a more marked urgent existentialism, seeking to build, from
these universal presumptions so much of realism and informality, a dialectic
image, critical to limit, without excluding, even in the extreme tension
of the social one of "Visionary Reasoning". And in this and later works,
he arrives at spreading out almost with arrogance, almost with rage. I
would like to say, in short, that this new interest for reality "of time
and place" underlined by Carluccio, has ended by drawing Sodo and his
painting into an eminently symbolic dimension, indefinable, across a determination
of place or of situation. It is a sign that the artist has known to assume
the risk of contradiction and ambiguity: a risk completely modern, outside
of which there is only placated indifference, a critical acception of
the fixed schemes of daily and social comportment, of the day to day.
Sodo has proposed
a most radical negation and to bring into well ordered fluency, styles
and signals of enigmatic images, encumbered with symbiosis, provocatively
allusive to the situations of daily life but frequentiy by sheer virtue
of art. From here the mecuperation of a new open dimension of the universai,
seen, hower, across the disjoined irony which is proper to symbols. L'uomo
Idea (Idea Man) and L'Uomo Spazio (Space Man) become, an Identikit or
of Nuovi Re (New Kings) characters of a collective ritual which turn into
some mythological corner of the present and encumbers memories of images
nevertheless disbelieved and justifies itself with the harmony of poetry.
Today this complicity is not necessary, or unnecessary. The artist himself,
attempting creditable interpretations of some reality that cannot be valued,
and undemstood "Socially". From the human larva, the deviating ectoplasm,
yet always tied to his own damnation as an individual, hermit, or protagonist
of an impossible final contest, Victorio Sodo has overrun a superstructural
figure that finds its own autonomy in the renounced conscience and to
be the image of man: Symbol, therefore it is strange, declares itself
thus without infringements and without illusions and not of art or of
rituals It is note case, I believe, that at a certain point the figurative
theme declares itself mythical, even the allusions of the present chronicle
of history are more mature, become translated into a mythological key.
The direct transposition of photography for example, is not longer less
distant from reality (that photography always conceals itself with the
false objectivity of the document) from the antipathy of the citation,
that Sodo, across iconographic schemes of Caravaggio or of some tapestry
of burning memory of nouveau art. Here, in these situations, works between
1977 and 1979, Victorio Sodo has show to have understood how to avoid
the alternative hypothesis of Luigi Lambertini amid results of figurative
punctuation and rational, 
controlled
abstraction of a sanguine human comedy. He has simply accepted the theatrical
dimension - at once - dimension of mite, of symbol, of masks or unreality
so displayed. It is neither figuration nor abstract but only ambiguous
and illusory, thus like ambiguity and illusion can only be the language
ensared by the fascination of a multiplicity of truth and by infinite
contradictions. The Artist loses the capacity to truly engrave in the
social contest, at least a level of some pragmatic ambition, he finds
once more a role of producer, of simulation, of reality opposed like "specters"
of implacable evidence loaded with the past and present but free of each
temporal pressure. I do not know if Victorio Sodo has truly premeditated
a similar choice but it seems to me that his works, especially the latter,
impregnated with a horrid lucidity of light, colour, and space, indicate
the surrender of the world, by now inevitable, signifying for the artist
a true acquisition of the right of falsehood, the grotesque, the theatrical
simulation in which with impunity (that is as the authorized creator of
fantastic monsters) he can vindicate his innocence and his right to speak.
We know that the court jester alone agreed to insult and shame the King.
The New Kings asked to be insulted and shamed aesthetically. Not enough,
I would add, declare the "Theatricaltry" of stage situations (The Puppeteer
- Il Burattinaio 1978; Nuovi Re (The New Kings on the Stage) 1978, but
even the Orgy (L'Orgia) and of the same period. It happens to justify
the quality of the works the right to the Jester's cap. It is here That
the argument turns to the skill of Sodo more surprisingly hereby is found
a plasticism till now exasperated (perhaps the heritage of the experience
as sculptor) with the corrosive explosion of incandescent colours, unreal
they may be that of a Pre Raphaelites to which they have been abstracted,
from some damnation of ideal serenity. The aesthetic world transforms
itself, in a controlled orgy of the aesthetic quality which leads to a
white heat of contradiction Perhaps only Renzo Vespignani in some of 
his
paintings, of a more horrid and nostalgic charm and splendid decadence
(in which be, an emblem, the memory of an impossible Imbarco per Citera)
has obtained results of such degeneration of images Victorio Sodo is perhaps,
more aggressive, I would say ruthless; he does not leave space neither
to the memory nor for hope to ransom some dimension of time and actual
space. Only the impracticability, that for the present is the real projection
of the Image, it can be stated and composed in some order of chromatic
violence, this crazed development and the solemn designs they have, however,
no more need to become entangled to draw the image to the weight of reality,
even mere psychology. If it is possible to say so, I would affirm that
it is an inflamed classicism, of a form inclining towards the tenets of
the renaissance only to break up from within with the derision of the
grotesque, with the poison of unrest finally exploding in superficiality
after having for a long lime polluted the images as in fact occurs in
Bacon and Giacomelli Now Victorio Sodo is about to vindicate the epoch
of his events and his characters, but this is possibly only in connection
with the coding of the roles of the "Theatrical Objects" whose appearance
is masked and whose substance must be forgotten. The contradiction, this
magic which has always saved Sodo from falling into the banal, of a critical
figuration, here in the more hallucinating and more patient forms. He
sees, as is stated, an unreality which is strongly strucutred, which builds
itself by virtue of momentary art in which the reality - or as de define
it - dissolves under the shock of a plastic fantasy that denies the fantastic
plasticism of much compressed Italian surrealism. It is seen that it is
not as a formal point of view between composition in which the grotesque
runs onto the mythological media, (all the series of Nuovi Re and L'Autoritratto
of Caravaggio-self portrait of Caravaggio) and that whereby the Theater
of false images, reigns over a banal representation (Donne 1979) brought
back to the unreality of a knowledgeable game of spatial rhythms. Here
the inquiry could continue by going deeper into a language already abused
and misunderstood of necessity, this it is totally arbitrary, free of
that freedom of voluntary art and despite oneself needs be understood.
But it would be a sorry argument for a painter like Victorio Sodo to be
unable to fix the particular without losing coherence. I can only say
that the improbable and hallucinatory use of colour, brought to invest
and at the same lime contract volumes - structures and narratives - is
perfectly coherent with that plastic fantasy of which Sodo considers ordinary,
and together they turn to an ancient and modem damnation of the mystical.
A damnation that the artist, today perhaps as ever, must conscientiously
discount.
Franco Solmi