Miro Silvera. LIBER SINGULARIS. With 10 drawings by Piero Fornasetti. Under the banner of the Pesce d'Oro, Milan 1977. COPY n.192

Miro Silvera
LIBER SINGULARIS
With 10 drawings by Piero Fornasetti

In the Name of the Golden Fish, Milan 1977

Copy No. 192

LIBER SINGULARIS, a text of poems and prose published in 1977 with 10 unpublished, very beautiful drawings, made specifically by Fornasetti for his young writer friend Miro Silvera.

The meeting could not have been more eccentric: a young cosmopolitan poet, born in Aleppo and of Jewish origin, and a visionary Lombard artist steeped in classical culture. Yet, what made them similar was a certain surrealist and vaguely metaphysical taste, as well as a boundless love for forms, applied arts and interior decoration. We are in Milan, in the Sixties and we are talking about Piero Fornasetti (1913-1988) and Miro Silvera (1942). A special meeting, which took place at the twilight of the artistic life of the Lombard genius of industrial design, who lived for a long time in Varenna, on Lake Como.

It is worth reflecting on that meeting by tracing it back to the hunger for talented and artistic role models that the thirty-year-old Silvera was hunting for and the need of both, the old and the young, to activate creative short circuits that were stimulating and imaginative.

Thus was born Liber Singularis, published in 1977 in the prestigious Scheiwiller poetry series. Both Piero and Miro cultivated the sense of mystery that surrounds art and life, an arcane and at the same time rational feeling that governs the creation of beauty (know/that the arcane/reigns/sovereign/and that the superhuman/disguises/himself/as human, Silvera writes in a poem; “We do not belong to this earth. We are guests, invaders. As we came, we leave. Poor and stupid. Each one has a different key, for another house that he does not know. It is the comedy of errors, in perpetuity”). Both, the old and the young, love references to metaphysical painting, love the surrealist sensitivity for word games, have a predilection for triple meanings or nonsense, cultivate a dreamlike taste for floating and rarefied visions, as long as they are enclosed in a compositional rigor that gives them order. Fantasy, elegance, rigor, humor.

This is what we find in Fornasetti’s objects and patterns, this is what we read in Miro Silvera’s lines, an imaginative digression that prompts an erudite and playful divertissement. Not that Silvera’s poems do not know the dimension of the tragic, but rather they want to ignore it, leave it on the margins.

His is an Orphic, mysterious dimension, where the passage of time is a return to the restless gnawing of life, to compromise. I am a desert among deserts... Ultimately, he writes of himself, je ne suis qu’un drame en cravate, I am nothing but a drama in a tie. And he adds, still ironically: I have, deep down, always lived as if at the movies. I wait for the light to come on.

Other verses invoke the stars / that sail / in my flesh / that govern / from above the weapons / the poems / of the defeated / the pace / of the crimes / you have impressed on me…Poems in which the Self is a crystal that dreams… What is love if not its waiting? For what do the angels spare us?, the poet asks.

"This little book is a thank you to Fornasetti for the teaching he left me, for his great creative freedom and for his gruff way of avoiding things and people who did not seem worthy of attention. That too was a master class that I still don't know how to apply well," says Silvera. "Quality has a price that is paid with solitude. But he is still here, among us, among so many beautiful objects; and he is also in the pages of this little book. Today I would like to say thank you to him: thank you Piero, for being here for us, a Master in the great Italian tradition of Decorum and Beauty."

(Taken from: https://www.mosaico-cem.it/cultura-e-societa/eventi/aleppo-sul-lago-di-como-4/)