" 'Solitary, impassive, impersonal...'. The three adjectives Bernard
Berenson applied to the great Antonello da Messina are equally fitting perhaps for Joseph Cusimano,
the contemporary Canadian painter who was born and grew up in Sicily. They fit him because of
certain formal and stylistic features (the only ones of relevance in the field of art, both then
and now), and not out of any vague, and for me hardly persuasive, ethnic or geographic notion of
common origin.
... Going back to the three
adjectives attached by Berenson to Antonello, one may say that they are also applicable to Cusimano
because of his painstakingness, his acute sense of precise luminosity, of geometric perspective
space and the sharp-etched power of the values that can be read in the work of this Canadian
painter. The key, however, is quite contrary to the lofty and distant clarity of the exemplary
Messinese master. Close scrutiny reveals a mirror-reversal of the contrast of elements which (as
Lionello Venturi has remarked) shifts Antonello's colour towards the particular the more his form
moves in the direction of the universal. In Cusimano the synthesis of the two elements comes about
by an inverse procedure. His colour, in fact, moves in the direction of the universal - towards
complete abstraction, that is - while his form tends to fix on the particular. This gives rise to
painting which, though born out of an immediate grasp of the real, overleaps the stumbling-block of
the given to deliver its every symbol intact to the realm of metaphysical signification ..."
Silvano Giannelli
