"... This Passage to Canada devoted to Joseph Cusimano is a book of great suggestive power.
... What emerges is a strong and touching story, full of echoes and reverberations... a coming-and-going between Canada and Sicily which is the very heart of Cusimano's painting: a sapient, quiet, aesthetically pleasing pictorial invention which at first seemed as if it had no wish to move too far away from reality, and which, instead,
through determination and patience, has built itself Surrealist wings so that it can soar with its own conceptions and blend with its own dreams. Cusimano's painting seems so closely akin to the Surrealist tradition that one is tempted to underline the analogies and indicate the references but... almost immediately, one becomes aware that there is 'something' that sets Cusimano's art outside of any orthodoxy.
And this 'something' comes into being when Cusimano brings together in his work the disturbing Surrealist experience and the classicizing metaphysic of the Giorgio de Chirico of the thirties. Through this operation Cusimano manages to strip the 'Surrealist mystery' of all its tragic tension ..."
Alberto Sughi
