The late-night television palimpsest is the world that I wish. Not for everyone - after all, recent events do nothing but remind us that the founding fathers’ idea of democracy has been shipwrecked to date - but definitely much freer, and infinitely more refined, than what our current pseudo-democracy deems worthy of vision. Last night, hypnotized by nightly zapping like every night-wanderer, every sleepwalker or every dreamer, I had the splendid encounter - because night is a Master in that too - with a documentary about that tout-court culture cantor that Gore Vidal has been. In 1995, from his lost paradise of Ravello, Vidal entitled Palimpsest his autobiography, arguing that, in literature, the word ‘palimpsest’ means a «paper, parchment, etc., prepared for writing on and wiping out again, like a slate, […] this is pretty much what my kind of writing does anyway. It starts with life; it makes a text; then a re-vision-literally, a second seeing, an afterthought, erasing some but not all of the original». It is always interesting to think that something can be both everything and its opposite. It is profitable, it amplifies mind receptors, allowing you to mistrust those that use the word ‘tolerance’ instead of ‘respect’. When you know that anything could also enshrine its opposite, you can more easily understand that everyone will always be North or South of someone else. It just depends on the context. Take the word ‘palimpsest’, and its changeable colour spectrum depending on the semantic field to which it relates: white in literature, like white is a page to fill; polychrome in television, while you zap at night, tones tending to black, a remote control like a helm. Pietro Sedda’s art is a palimpsest inflected in both palettes dying this lemma, monochrome in his artistic action, polychrome in his iconographic patrimony. His art is naked, with a storm in its eyes. On the edge of the abyss between purity and lasciviousness, it refers to the archetypical figure the ‘sacratio’ by Rudolf Otto, taken up by Jean Clair in De Immundo: «The sacer manifests the impossibility of separating the sacred, the saint, the sacrosanct just as it is commonly understood, from the impure, from the cursed, from the abominable. Sacer is that which, in a living being or in an object, simultaneously belongs to the field of the sacred and the filth, of taboo and untouchability, of consecration and outlawing, of a secret to conceal and the obscene to be refused». Unavoidable ambiguity for an art like tattooing considering that, since biblical times, the first tattoo artist in history was God and the first tattooed Cain, with a sign that simultaneously cursed his descendants and protected him in person8. Everything and its opposite, stigma and shield, even at the hand of God. The very iconography of Pietro Sedda does not detract from the ductility whose daughter it is; an example lies in his use of swastika among his subjects, scandal only for those who do not know that, on Eastern coordinates, it is one of the most ancient symbols of humanity, as a greeting to the Sun and a call to well-being, distorted on Western coordinates in the hands of the most hateful of ideologies. After all, here is what art calls to, and from which Sedda for one does not escape: to open one’s mind, starting from a sign. Methodologically, Pietro Sedda’s art is a literary palimpsest. Internationally renowned for his faces as scenery flat, as if they were a surrealist tableau’s proscenium, by means of his classical and minimal trait - trace of a profound culture of image - Sedda subtracts connotations from impeccably combed faces to turn them into a physiognomic perimeter of floral embroidery and digital glitches, of languid passions and ships adrift, introducing the debate about how to actually face an identity, whether a face is enough or a scene is needed. Visage becomes total, relating the exterior to the interior in an absolute way, emptying from what has been given to fill with what Sedda, catalyst and shaman, chooses as the most authentic connotations of the person for whom he becomes interpreter. Every tattoo by Pietro Sedda is the iconization of an imagery flailing under the skin and overlapping with it, through his act - primarily aesthetic, but also psychological - of understanding it and drawing it out. Cut canvas for Fontana, burnt canvas for Burri, like a palimpsest to write and rewrite, the body is a tattooed canvas for an artist who, through his gesture, experiments with other territories, inventing new icons for them as an official language. Ontologically, Pietro Sedda’s art is a night TV palimpsest, free from the daylight hypocrisy on what is convenient to be or not to be. Channel 1: educational documentaries about the stormy nature archetype. Channel 2: show cooking with a focus on the slow digestion of romantic painting, seasoned with Pop and flavoured with the rum preferred by the crew. Main ingredients: Flemish portraiture and English Bad Painting, Pompeian decorations’ phytomorphic motifs and nineteenth-century botanical engravings, the 1950s advertising illustration and the daring iconography of Tom of Finland, the perfect pleats by Issey Miyake and the poetic distortions of Nam June Paik. Morbid portraiture like that of Marlene Dumas, iconographic like a Saint Sebastian and an Ecce Homo, prophetic like Andy Warhol and the tarots’ arcana, honest as the Apocrypha, blasphemous as Francis Bacon, Divine as the Comedy and divine as the Dietrich. Mix everything and transfer to the skin, decorating to taste according to the artist's inspiration, always sapiently measured. Channel 3: Netflix TV series about the story of Ahab surviving the waves, and the demon he created all by himself, disembarking in a mega-mall. Second episode: Ahab at the kasbah. Pietro Sedda's iconography is pure surrealist syncretism with pop tips, aware that man’s vices and virtues can change name and time, but not matter. Channel 4: break - overview of epidermal landscapes with a soundtrack of electro soundscapes. Channel 5: cult movie marathon: The Pillow Book [P. Greenaway, 1995], The face of another [H. Teshigahara, 1966], Freaks [T. Browning, 1932], �ui êtes-vous, Polly Maggoo? [W. Klein, 1966], �uerelle [R. W. Fassbinder, 1982], The Illustrated Man [J. Smight, 1969], A quiet place in the country [E. Petri, 1968]. Following: studio-debate about filmmaking’s mythopoeic ability, mastered by Sedda as a magistral director in staging, ink on skin, his aesthetic electrico/romantico bestiary. Channel 6: rerun of the Sunday Mass with homily on the body as Golgotha, place of the skull and therefore of the Vanitas [warning: XXX TV programme]. Channel 7: original language broadcasts about the translation of what Lacan called ‘the word of love’: encore, French assonance superimposing un corps [a body, but also a corpse, just like Eros and Thanatos’ continuo also attributable to tattoo] with the adverb of insatiability, again. Subtle addiction and forbidden pleasure, Sedda's complete works - on living skin or on a leather seat, on spolvero pad or on a table cloth, on fine china or on the organic cotton of a t-shirt - is a play of mirrors, non-chronological portraits sons of one mind, in an iconographic reference whose source is his own trait, because «there is no great artist whose work does not lead us to say: 'the same thing, yet something else'9». The same thing, yet something else. What is expected of night, night after night, when you embrace it as your own dimension, when everything around is silence and, finally, the imaginary takes shape. Nevertheless, night is nothing but a context; what deeply matters, in art, is the palimpsest. 8 «'Anyone who kills Cain will suffer vengeance seven times over'. Then the Lord put a mark on Cain so that no one who found him would kill him» [Genesis, 4:15]. 9 Gilles Deleuze, Proust & signs, I ed. or. Presses Universitaires de France, 1964. palimpsest [zapping in the night] 74 75 stage name nome d’arte
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