ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT THE FLAGS OF RAVENUZA

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30511, 5 August 1964, Page 8

ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT THE FLAGS OF RAVENUZA

[Specially written for "The Press" by JOHN CObBY]

In America the visitor is constantly confronted with the culture of the old world transported to the new. In New York, for example, he can munch pickled turnips in a Lebanese restaurant, drink frothy brews in an atmosphere redolent of Bavarian beer halls, and In Los Angeles drive past timbered Tudor mansions in suburbs which were featureless tracts of Californian desert JO years ago.

Having noted the variety of ways in which this phenomena occurs, a recent visitor to Salt Lake City’s Art Centre was nevertheless unprepared for what he encountered there—an exhibition of Sicilian bed sheets. The sheets were about 25 in number, and these looked considerably older than that in years. They had been patched and repatched, but stretched over frames set into

dark-coloured display boards and illuminated from behind by strong lights in a semidarkened room, they became glowing panels of patterned light, resembling huge photograms. Strange And Subtle The various shapes and thicknesses of cloth patches used to mend them over the years created strangely beautiful and subtle designs, reminiscent of Ben Nicholson’s paintings. But beyond superficial decoration the sheets held in their threadbare and endlessly reworked patches the story of a poverty-stricken Sicilian village. They were also the revelation of an artist’s acute visual preception. This is the insight that brings new meaning to the familiar and commonplace—such as when we discover that a spoon can be transformed miraculously into a shoehorn.

Angelo Caravaglia, a MidWest sculptor and graphic artist, was making one of his periodic visits to the village of Ravenuza, his father’s

birthplace in Sicily’s Agricento province, when he noticed the newly laundered sheets fluttering in the sun above the streets. To his artist’s eye they ceased to be prosaic laundry but instead suddenly became visual metaphors, summing up the environment, the harsh landscape and bitter poverty, in which the people of Ravenuza exist ’ Echo of Sicily He saw in the bleached whiteness of the linen a reflection of Agricento’s burning plains, shimmering heatsmitten mountains and blindingly white-washed villages. As the sun revealed the patchwork patterns, he recognised in their shapes an echo of the lopsided rectangular forms of the village buildings. The infinite care and patience with which the sheets had been mended told of a people who could afford to waste nothing; who would mend and remend until the original cloth had all but disappeared. Caravaglia decided to buy up a selection of these two-

dimensional ready mades and exhibit them for their unconscious artistry and the story they revealed. But at first his efforts to purchase were met with suspicion by the superstitious villagers who imagined some dark purpose behind his attempts. They could not understand why this man should wish to pay the price, of a new sheet (about N.Z. 12s 6d) for these ancient threads. When he eventually convinced them of the honesty of his motives, word quickly spread and within a few hours men were arriving by mule with bundles from neighbouring villages. Business at the fountain in Ravenuza’s tiny square was brisk. Washday Scene

Burri, the Italian painter who features in his works the textured surfaces of sacking and other coarse fabrics, was fascinated by the bedsheets and began forming his own collection. Others followed his lead and now on washdays more and more of the sheets that wave like flags over the streets of Ravenuza are brand spanking new—and unpatched. John Coley is a Christchurch painter and lecturer at the Christchurch Teachers’ College who studied art education in America under an Arts Advisory Council Award.