Il miglior modo di prevedere il futuro è costruirlo
GIORGIO OREFICE @ ALL RIGHT RESERVED 2021
Table 8: Jesus meets the pious women
Here the narrative becomes more intimate and severe; the profiles of the women emerge directly from the basaltic background like apparitions carved into the very memory of the stone. Christ, wrapped in a cloak where red pigments and nitro enamels create a dark and deep chromatic contrast, lowers his gaze toward the female figures. There is no room for sentimentalism: it is a meeting of silent glances, a dialogue of pity and pain in which the crown of thorns, traced with white and sharp lines by the energy of fire, configures itself as a painful and regal seal that isolates the solitude of the condemned man even in the face of others' compassion.
Table 9: Jesus is crushed to the ground for the third time
A work of absolute compositional and conceptual audacity. Here, the verticality of man is definitively defeated and annihilated. Christ is on the ground, entirely overwhelmed, crushed and reduced to one with the volcanic soil to which the immense and blind weight of the gallows forces him. The line of the cross and the horizontality of matter dominate the entire surface of the Etna slab, compressing the figure of Jesus onto the lower margin. The face, partially hidden and confused among the roughness of the rock and the lumps of dark enamel, almost loses its anthropomorphic features to become a geological element, dust among dust. In this station, Orefice reaches an extraordinary interpretive peak: the lava stone is no longer merely the support of the work, but becomes the very flesh of the world that welcomes and buries the body of the innocent, visually translating the instant in which the sacred fully and dramatically merges with the darkness and heaviness of primordial matter.
Table 10: He is stripped of his garments
The drama reaches the threshold of total exposure, a station in which critical attention must necessarily isolate the monumental dignity of the Just One. If the act of stripping is conceived by the executioners as the extreme humiliation inflicted to erase the man's identity, Christ's attitude radically overturns this intention. The Nazarene does not contract, he does not huddle in dishonor; his body, touched by the chromatic contrast between the purple robe laid with nitro enamels and the bare lava stone, retains a regal composure. The head is inclined in an austere silence, while a dark and rapacious hand penetrates the visual space to tear away his fabrics: a violent intrusion that emphasizes, by contrast, the absolute moral isolation of Jesus, whose spiritual integrity remains intangible precisely while he is deprived of any earthly protection.
Table 11: He is nailed to His cross
Undoubtedly one of the emotional and conceptual peaks of the entire work. The framing focuses on the left hand, wide open and pierced by the ruthless iron, while the arm becomes a diagonal axis that crosses the tormented matter of Etna's volcanic support. However, beyond the intrinsically atrocious act of crucifixion, the element that shocks the viewer lies in the upper part of the slab: if one examines the swollen and battered face of Christ carefully, one discovers that the right eye opens into a sharp and piercing slit. This gaze is not directed to the sky in search of consolation, but points straight toward the observer, launching a silent and extremely powerful accusation. It is a formal protest against those who look on impassively, a moral call that transforms the audience's neutrality into a form of silent complicity. Through the wise use of fire that fixes the pigment onto the bare basalt, Orefice tears through the historical distance of the sacred account, nailing the conscience of the contemporary viewer before the injustices of the present.
Table 12: Crucified between two thieves
The response of the cosmos to this visual cry is finally fulfilled. Here, the artist temporarily abandons the psychological close-up to embrace a highly symbolic overview of a universal layout. The dark silhouette of the central cross stands out against an immense and blinding solar disk, evoked through a pasty and vibrant application of yellow and ochre pigments, whose thermal reaction creates an almost magmatic texture. The sun, instead of illuminating, seems to consume the space, while at the foot of the gallows, the dark shadows of the witnesses and the oblique crosses of the thieves define a jagged and desolate horizon line. In this table, the perfect synthesis of Orefice's artistic movement is fulfilled: the lava matter, born from the fiery bowels of the earth, becomes the stage for a total eclipse of the spirit, where the solitude of the just man hanging from the wood is glorified and enclosed within a cosmic drama that indissolubly unites the destiny of man to primordial nature.
Table 13: Taken down and returned to His Mother
The circle tightens and is completed in the final two stations, bringing the entire mosaic cycle on lava stone to a level of epilogue that surpasses pure chronicle to become visual theology. The lifeless body is finally delivered to silence, a composition that revisits the archetype of the Pietà through a ruthless and moving anatomical investigation.
Here, the artist erases any residue of dynamic tension: the body of the Nazarene is abandoned into the hands of the Virgin, highlighting an unnatural and dramatic bend of the neck that formally sanctions the arrival of death. That posture no longer reflects any earthly life; the facial features, marked by lumps of dark pigment and thermal hematomas generated by the action of fire on nitro enamels, return the inert weight of the sacrificed flesh.
Mary welcomes her Son, holding him in an embrace in which the porosity of Etna's rock becomes the rough surface of maternal pain, a gray and desolate ground where the darkness of the volcanic support swallows the characters and amplifies the silence of the darkest hour.
Table 14: His body is buried
This extraordinary aesthetic parabola finds its greatest and most brilliant resolution here, undoubtedly the most pictorially successful, complex, and resolved work of the entire sequence.
Orefice performs a highly profiled conceptual operation here: the mystery of the burial is visualized and concentrated once again through the dramatic close-up of Christ's face. The figure of the Nazarene, placed on the lower margin of the slab as if emerging from or sinking into the very bowels of the earth, is progressively led and brought closer to the black hole of the sepulcher, a circular opening of absolute shadow dug into the heart of the stone.
Beside this geometric abyss, the circular stone of the tomb, defined by a pasty and vibrant application of yellow and sulfurous tones, seems almost to catch the last reflection of a cosmic light. Precisely in this apparent annihilation of the flesh, Orefice's work opens to its deepest meaning: that black hole does not represent a definitive end, but rather the threshold of an epochal transition.
It is exactly from that underground darkness, from that lava silence in which the body of the innocent is sealed, that Christ and Christianity paradoxically shake themselves and begin to truly live, transforming the stone sepulcher into the point of origin of an eternal spiritual revolution.
