THE BARON IN THE TREES - Limited Edition 1 of 50 (Signed) Print

My name is Ivan Cangelosi, I was born in Palermo where I studied foreign languages. Having returned to Italy after a brief experience in Great Britain, I graduated in Political Science in Padua. Historical, philosophical and social subjects have always fascinated me and the field of international relations and the United Nations were the natural career path. The "call" from art (the "Berufung" to use a German word that means "Vocation", "Being called to a duty", from which the term "Beruf", or "Profession" derives) came suddenly like a sort of "deja-vu", like something I had inside me buried and forgotten. It indeed often happens in life, that we forget, along the way, about the small/big passions or talents we had in childhood or youth; the good news is that it is they, those passions and talents, that do not forget about us and if they find the right moment, they come back to life suddenly and in a powerful way. This is what happened with art, and in particular with this particular way of making art. It happened that one day, reading a page of "Crime and Punishment", I imagined Dostoevskji writing those same lines with pen and inkwell. I imagined his gesture, his pauses for reflection, his doubts and finally his satisfaction. And so instinctively I took a piece of paper and a pen and began to copy that page by hand, seeking an impossible identification with the writer. I copied the first page, I copied the second and then the third, the fourth, the fifth...until I decided to rewrite the entire first volume within a single space. Yes, because the more I copied those wonderful pages by hand, the more I realized that what really interested me was the aesthetic aspect of what I was doing, that is, taking the use of handwriting as the substance and color to its extreme consequences, through the spatial redistribution of the novel within a single support, in order to transform that written text from something that could be read, leafing through the book page after page, in two, three or four weeks, into something that could be seen, all in once, here and now. Of that first attempt at rewriting a literary text by hand within a single space, only a couple of photos remain (published in the "Works" section of this website), the paper having been lost during a move. This was therefore the intuition from which everything was born.