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GIORGIO OREFICE @ ALL RIGHT RESERVED 2021
The Sacred Art of Giorgio Orefice: The Way of the Cross on Volcanic Stone
The investigation into sacred art conducted by Giorgio Orefice offers the viewer a radical visual experience, a raw and powerful descent into the territories of human suffering and divine mystery that finds its monumental fulfillment in the Way of the Cross preserved in the Sanctuary of the Madonna delle Lacrime in Syracuse.
Painted on lava slabs from the Etna volcano through a technique of ancestral impact that blends colored pigments, nitro enamels, and the transformative power of fire, the work programmatically detaches itself from any traditional scenographic or illustrative intent. Orefice erases the anecdotal component, rejecting the choral narrative or the spectacularization of martyrdom—historically populated by Roman centurions, tumultuous crowds, and minor characters—to isolate solely the theological and anthropological essence of the drama: the pain, injustice, and torment suffered by a thirty-three-year-old man in the last three hours of his earthly life.
What the artist pursues through the fourteen stations is a phenomenology of Christ's face, captured in his shocking and innocent humanity as he goes through the fulfillment of his own moral and fleshly destiny.
The Matter of Martyrdom
The true core of Orefice's operation lies in the expressive medium.
Painting on the lava stone of Etna means entering into a dialogue with a matter that is already, in itself, the result of a trauma, of a liquefaction, and a subsequent solidification.
The use of pigments and nitro enamels, attacked and fused through the direct action of fire, allows the artist to "inhabit" the porosity of the lava. The texture of the stone does not serve as a background, but becomes flesh: the holes, roughness, and dark veins of the lava support turn into the shadows of the face, into the imperfections of the suffering skin, indissolubly binding Christ's body to the spine of the Earth. It is not a painting on stone, but a painting of the stone, where the volcano's natural algorithm welcomes and amplifies the human mark.
Table 1: Condemned to death by crucifixion
The visual space is entirely saturated by the close-up of the Nazarene. His wide eyes, filled with a silent and profound awareness, directly question the observer, transforming them from a passive witness into a moral accomplice of the event. The crown of thorns bears the first, vivid wound of blood upon his forehead, while in the background, almost faded into the basaltic gray of the stone, the figure of Pontius Pilate washes his hands in a gesture that wrinkles authority into bureaucratic indifference.
The intrinsic porosity of the lava slab actively participates in the emotional rendering: the roughness of the stone, attacked by fire and enamels, becomes living flesh, skin marked by trauma, dust that mixes with the majesty of the divine face.
Table 2: A wooden cross is imposed upon Christ
This station shifts the compositional axis toward a dynamic of physical and psychological compression. Christ's face bends, tilting under the weight of the wooden structure that breaks into the composition as an oppressive diagonal.
His eyes here are closed, or shut tight in a grimace that is not of resignation, but of painful and intimate recollection before the journey; his clenched teeth reveal the immense effort of the body impacting against the hardness of the gallows. Orefice uses nitro enamels and the thermal reaction of fire to strip down the contours, letting the dark and dense texture of Etna's lava emerge as a psychological shadow, the very substance of fatigue and abandonment.
The cross is not a simple iconographic attribute, but a crushing geometric presence that attacks the figure, emphasizing the absolute solitude of the innocent in the face of torment.
Table 3: He falls for the first time
That tension breaks and turns into a vertical collapse in the next station.
The face, which in the first tables maintained a frontal or oblique centrality, here bends downward, yielding to the gravity of the exhausted flesh. The eyes remain closed, the mouth is slightly open and marked by a stream of blood that cracks its composure; the crown of thorns, traced with nervous and sharp lines, seems to become even more vivid against the tormented paleness of the complexion. The purple cloak loses any regal or decorative connotation to become a dense chromatic stain, a clot of color that dialogues with the warm, sulfurous tones of the volcanic background, where the yellow and ochre streaks seem to evoke the desolation of both an interior and exterior landscape.
The lava stone, in its nature as primordial matter born from the deep fire of the earth, thus becomes the perfect objective correlative of the Passion, the ideal support upon which Orefice carves the universal archetype of human pain, opening the way to a continuous narrative that indissolubly unites the brutality of matter with the verticality of the spirit.
Table 4: He meets His Mother
The intimate path of the drama undergoes a further, heartbreaking psychological acceleration here. The scenic space becomes almost claustrophobic, tightening into a fragment of crossed glances that excludes the rest of the world. Mary's profile rises toward her Son, her lips parted in a silent and shocking question, a suffocated cry that seems to articulate the ancient and universal maternal dismay: my son, what are they doing to you?
To this total question, Christ responds not with the hieratic detachment of a martyr, but with an expression filled with a touching human closeness, almost a sense of intimate regret. On his face, bent toward his Mother, flows a single, clear tear, a sharp detail that shines upon the dark surface of the lava stone: it is not weeping for his own torment, but the expression of pure pain generated by seeing the suffering impressed in the eyes of the one who gave him birth.
The volcanic matter, attacked by enamels and fire, here interprets a tragic tenderness, where the porosity of the lava accentuates the contrast between the hardness of destiny and the fragility of feelings.
Table 5: Simon of Cyrene is forced to help Christ carry the Cross
In this table, the composition is structured on a play of opposing weights and volumes.
The face of the Cyrenian emerges from the deep shadow of the basaltic support, partially defined by decisive strokes, as if to symbolize the randomness and the compulsion of an unbought encounter, which has instead become a brutal sharing of the same yoke.
The body of Christ, marked by the thermal and chemical reactions of the nitro enamels, shows the evident signs of an impending physical collapse, while the cross, massive and transversal, cuts diagonally across the chromatic background, printing a geometric tension onto the slab that crushes both figures within the same destiny of stone.
Table 6: A woman named Veronica wipes the face of Christ
In this station, the critic's attention must necessarily focus on the ruthless and realistic rendering of the Nazarene's swollen face, where the artist's technique, through the calibrated use of fire and pigments, restores the tangible signs of blows, beatings, and extreme exhaustion. Upon this stripped surface engrafts the extraordinary and spontaneous delicacy of Veronica's gesture. The female figure, moved by an immediate pity that tears through the surrounding atmosphere of violence, offers the cloth with a disarming naturalness.
The woman's hands, holding the white fabric destined to collect the imprint of that tortured face, create a parabola of light and temporary relief, a very strong chromatic and conceptual contrast with the shadow density of Etna's lava, demonstrating how Orefice's art manages to bring forth the highest spiritual intensity precisely where the matter becomes roughest, most hostile, and dramatically real.
Table 7: Christ falls to the ground for the second time
The dramatic sequence centered on the progressive physical collapse of the Nazarene finds its most ruthless and coherent geometric and material evolution in this core of stations. Here, the artist stages the extreme resistance of the body before the definitive collapse: Christ still resists under the crushing weight of the wood, but it is a resistance by now devoid of hope, where the breath becomes visibly short—masterfully evoked by the mouth open in a desperate demand for air—and the immense effort seems to destroy every single nerve, draining any residual will. The hand, convulsively gripping the cross veined with warm and yellowish tones, becomes the fulcrum of a muscular tension close to breaking, while the tormented texture of the lava stone follows the torsion of the head, amplifying the sense of an agony that is no longer merely spiritual, but radically biological and fleshly.