"... 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
