« Gravé dans le marbre » “VERBA VOLANT, SCRIPTA MANENT… it would indeed be better for certain words to continue their flight and sink into oblivion. Thus one may think of the public repartees of our political personalities. Between aphorisms and counter briefs, their more or less spontaneous verbatim accounts reveal as much as they betray. Specific to an era and a society, their words, in their tenor or their ardor, nevertheless cover a timeless dimension that deserves to be meditated on. This is why, as a scribe witness of his time, Fabrizio Saracino undertook to preserve the memory of the words of our politicians by writing them in a universal language, Latin, so that they remain. Overstating, he engraves them in marble. The oxymoron is total. Everything opposes the materiality of the support to the evanescence of the remark, the antiquity of a thousand-year-old concretion to the fleetingness of a line, the preciousness of marble to the triviality of a sally. Promised to be forgotten, these sentences are now dedicated to posterity. Their eloquence is thereby reinforced, their durability assured, their vacuity notified. O tempora, o mores ! What have Cato and Cicero become? Casualness disputes them with inanity, peremptory with vulgarity. If the truth is altered, the reference to Antiquity comes here to shake up the values. Bearing the stamp of irony, the artist’s intention is to underline, implicitly, the negligence of political speech. By glorifying it with a Latin script chiselled in the most refined marbles, he inscribes it in History. More poetic than political, the work of Fabrizio Saracino also lies in the beauty of the selected stones which precious names refer to as many iridescent or shimmering colors. More critical than historical, his work nevertheless plays with the notion of monumentality. By the dimensions and the very nature of the support, he questions our relationship to memory and saves in extremis these anthological bursts from a damnatio memoriae.”
Cyrille Gouyette
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