The Reflection Of Hecate Eyes. Essences and Waitings in Tiberio Gracco's art

The atmosphere chosen by Tiberio Gracco and carefully exploited is the night, present in the changing chromaticisms, fading in the shades of the blues and in the subjects portrayed on the canvas. The night, relax dispenser, saver from daily breathlessness, is the sleep and the dreams mother, rather deeply of a dimension dissociated from the self-investigation, not linked to preconceptions, superfluities and reason, and clearly free from an introspective reason. Often the portrayed characters have half-closed eyes, sleepy dancers deprived of gravity they are waiting, extended to the listening whose nocturnal and silent dimension can support and drive. Also moon is often present in the artistic iconography: as star, delicate smile cutting the blue of the night; as soft light lighting up with finesse the representation giving it a mythical and magical light; as necklace, symbolic jewel recalling the periodical appeal. Furthermore, "die" and "become" are the basis of an investigation of formation/configuration which is a theme really dear to the artist called back by the snail which iconographically suggests hair-style and female habit while metaphorically implying cyclicity. The attention towards the discovery of something escaping to man, even if it strongly belongs to him, is in the presence of the stars, stylized and swift shapes which stand above the protagonists of his painting with the fascinating meaning of both cosmic order symbols and bright keepers. So in the “imbalances” imposed by the investigation work and by its immensity, they are the geometrical and spiritual “balances” of the landmarks which orientate and watch over: finally, everything is recalled to the balancement, the perfection and the catharsis.The artist's study and his representative proposal prefer the female shape into a triad that in the mythology is thus of central importance in the ideal world (The Graces, The Hours, The Parcae, The Erinyes), but it is a new Hecate, the main character of the canvas, the enigmatic goodness linked to ancestral rites and symbolisms and at the same time of an unexplored future, joined - in any case- to the sky. Moreover, the female figure appears sophisticated in the marvellous elegance of her own naked body, lost in long abandonments, suspended into the plots thus showing a timeless, wiry, translucent and three-and one body, where the streched head commemorates the Egyptian princess rituals which, after the bandaged, showed a beauty consacrating them, with not more human features, for ever daughters of the divine. But past is indissolubly joined to the future: they are young daughters with alien, celestial features into a unexpected, ideal and future meaning: Tiberio Gracco's fascinating and secret experience told by new divinities. Lyrically, they fight against ribbons and knots, prisons and cages of soul, but it is a dancing fight where the grace dominates the contrasts and restlessness. So very often the features are crouched, shut up on themselves, newly cyclical, as buds poetically tormented, others, in antithesis, extended and leapt, they float, others are in training: an unfinished appearance connotes the metamorphosis under the eye of a spectator. Light shapes, sometimes, run cross invisible towns, a hint to a human existing situation, but far, almost a memory vision. Among the prevalent colours, the ones owning life as a whole: golden of perfection put in relation with superior forces, light and a desired incorruptibility; the red colour of blood, essence and soul of Eros overwhelming voluptuousness, and of Ares angry power. Among many qualities of the complex conception which characterize Gracco's work, there is the symbolic allusion, overstept and elevated into a refined graphic-formal syntheticism, as in the artist, everything evokes “feeling”: the portrayed subjects seem to be truly listening, veiled and pierced by the transparencies, reflecting and incorporating everything around them. All this is expressed through essential chromaticisms of rare elegance which give immediately the fruition of a complex and deep poetry. Vestal virgins and oracles, Gracco's women, rarely turn their look towards the observer, unattainable queens of a wanted world of mortals, sparks, reflections and glares connected with Hecate's gaze.