• "J.L.B." (2011)

    All the work is inspired by this image, realized during my multimedia project about the “House of Spiritual Retreat” by Emilio Ambasz, showned at the M.o.M.A. in the season 2005-2006. Quickly after I have realized the photo I have thought to a poetry by Jorge Luis Borges. From this moment, during seven years, I have continued to look for the Borges soul inside the world of the visible.

    Michele Alassio

     

    “With the evening, two or three colours of the patio get tired. This night, the moon, this pale circle, does not dominate its space. Patio, channelled sky. The patio is the downward slope where the sky overflows the house. Serene eternity waits at the crossroad of the stars. It is wonderful to live with friendship hidden by an atrium, by a pergola and by a cistern.”....(Read more)

    From “Un Patio” in “Fervore di Buenos Aires” (1923)

  • "J.L.B."

    In one of the most famous phrases in the history of criticism, the Roman poet Horace included in his Ars poetica this somple lapidary injuction: “Ut pictura poesis”.

    In other words, we must consider a literary text to be as worthy of critical discernment as is a picture. In staking out the rights of literary expression to be held to the same hig critical standards as painting the were, Horace sought to under mine the dominance of painting as the ultimate and most sublime form of art.

    “Ut pictura poesis” came to my mind immediately when I first saw Michele Alassio’s gorgeous book, J.L.B., a copy of which he was kind enough to send me after its first printing. As that time I was the President of The New York Public Library, whose magnificent Rose Main Reading Room appears in two of the twenty-one highly poetic images that Michele included in the book.....(Read more)

    Paul Leclerc
    President Emeritus, New York Public Library

  • Grimani Palace, Venice, January 2009

    “ …that all the arts aspire to the condition of music, which is nothing but form. Music, state of happiness, mythology, faces shaped by time, certain twilights and certain places, try to tell us something, or they told us something. That we should not have lost, or want to tell us something; this imminence of a revelation as yet unproduced is, perhaps, the aesthetic act”

    Last paragraph of “The Wall and the Books” in “Other Inquisitions” (1950)

    Plotter print on Hahnemühle Museum Paper / Edition of ten, variable sizes

     

  • Uffizi, Florence, Italy, October 2009

    “ I reread these negative remarks and realize that I do not know whether music can despair of music or marble of marble. I do know that literature is an art that can foresee the time when it will be silenced, and art that can become inflamed with its own virtue, fall in love with its own decline, and court its own demise.”

    Last paragraph of “The Superstitious Ethics of the Readers” in “Discusion”(1932)

    Plotter print on Hahnemühle Museum Paper / Edition of ten, variable sizes

     

  • Paper Mill “Le Carte”, Pescia, May 2010

    “ The very fact of perceiving, of pay attention is selective; al attention, all focusing of our consciousness, involves a deliberate omission, of what is not interesting”

    From “The postulation of Reality” in “Discusion” (1932)

    Plotter print on Hahnemühle Museum Paper / Edition of ten, variable sizes

     

  • Public Library Reading Room, New York, November 2007

    “…We (the undivided divinity which works in us) have dreamed the world. We have dreamed of it as resistant, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and still in time but we have allowed tenuous and eternal cracks in its architecture to know it is false.”

    From “The Metempsyschosis of the Tortoise” in “Discusion” (1932)

    Plotter print on Hahnemühle Museum Paper / Edition of ten, variable sizes

     

  • Pietrasanta, Tuscany, Italy, October 2009

    “This bullet is ancient. In 1897 it was fired against the president of Uruguay by a boy from Montevideo, Arredondo, who had passed a long time without seeing anyone so that they would know he had no accomplices. Thirty years before, the same bullet had killed Lincoln by the criminal or magic action of an actor who had been converted by Shakespeare’s words into Marco Bruto, Caesar’s assassin. Towards the middle of the 17th c. the vendetta used it to put Gustavo Adolfo of Sweden to death in the public massacre of a battle. Earlier, the bullet had been other things because Pythagorean transmigration involves not only men. It was the silken cord which the viziers of the Orient received, it was the fusillade and bayonets which destroyed the defenders of The Alamo, it was the triangular axe which cut the neck of a queen, it was the dark nails which pierced the flesh of the saviour and the wood of the cross, it was the poison which the head Carthaginian kept in an iron ring, it was the serene chalice which Socrates drank at sunset. In the dawn of time it was the stone Cain cast against Abel and it will be many things which we cannot even imagine today and which will finish with men and their prodigious and fragile destiny.”

    “In Memoriam J.F.K” from “The Maker” (1960)

    Plotter print on Hahnemühle Museum Paper / Edition of ten, variable sizes

     

  • Keens Steackhouse, New York, October 2007
    "The Other Tiger"

    “The Other Tiger” from “The Maker” (1960)

    Plotter print on Hahnemühle Museum Paper / Edition of ten, variable sizes

  • Public Library Reading Room, New York, November 2007

    “Toward dawn he dreamed that he had concealed himself in one of the naves of the Clementine Library. A librarian wearing dark glasses asked him: “What are you looking for?” Hladik answered: “I am looking for God.” The librarian said to him: “God is in one of the letters on one of the pages of one of the four hundred thousand volumes of the Clementine. My fathers and the fathers of my fathers have searched for this letter; I have grown blind seeking it.”He removed his glasses, and Hladik saw his eyes, which were dead.”

    J.L.B. From “The Secret Miracle” from “Ficciones” (1944)

    Plotter print on Hahnemühle Museum Paper / Edition of ten, variable sizes

     

  • Room of the Maps, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, Italy, January 2011

    “There is nothing in the world which is not mysterious, but this mystery is more evident in some things than in others. In the sea, in the colour yellow, in the eyes of the elderly and in music.”

    From “The Temple of Poseidon”, in “Atlas” (1984)

    Plotter print on Hahnemühle Museum Paper / Edition of ten, variable sizes

     

  • Viaduc Chaumont, Chaumont, France, November 2010

    “It’s the door that make the choice, not the man”

    From “Frammenti di un Vangelo apocrifo” in “Elogio dell’0mbra” (1969)

    Plotter print on Hahnemühle Museum Paper / Edition of ten, variable sizes

     

  • Siena Hill’s, Italy, February 2011

    “I am the only spectator of this road; if I stopped seeing it, it would die.”

    From “Camminata” in “Fervore di Buenos Aires” (1925)

    Plotter print on Hahnemühle Museum Paper / Edition of ten, variable sizes

     

  • St. Galgano Abbey, Siena, Italy, February 2011

    “To he who establishes omnipotent norms and a rigid, secret measure to shadows and phantoms, and to the forms which weave and unravel life, if for everything there is a limit and there is a rule, and the last time and for always and oblivion. Who in this house will able to tell us we said goodbye without knowing it?”

    From “Limits” in “The Other, the same” (1964)

    Plotter print on Hahnemühle Museum Paper / Edition of ten, variable sizes

  • New York, November 2007

    Funes the Memoriuosus

    From “Finzioni” (1944)

    Plotter print on Hahnemühle Museum Paper / Edition of ten, variable sizes

  • Riccardiana Library, Florence, Italy, January 2009

    “You were already here, even before entering, and when you go out you will not know that you have remained.”

    From “Alla Francia” in “History of the Night” (1977)

    Plotter print on Hahnemühle Museum Paper / Edition of ten, variable sizes

  • Villa Pisani, Italy, March 2008

    “If space is infinite, we are in just any point in space. If time is infinite, we are at just any point of time.”

    From “ The Book of sand” (1975)

    Plotter print on Hahnemühle Museum Paper / Edition of ten, variable sizes

  • Cà Rezzonico, Venice, Italy, January 2008

    “God created the nights which are filled with dreams and figures in the mirrors so that Man may think it is a reflection and vanity. This is why we are afraid.”

    From “Gli Specchi” in “L’Artefice” (1960)

    Plotter print on Hahnemühle Museum Paper / Edition of ten, variable sizes

  • St. Galgano Abbey, Siena, Italy, February 2011

    “Sunset is always moving whether it be poverty-stricken or gaudy, but even more moving is that desperate and final sparkle which rusts the plain when the last sun sinks into it. It hurts us to bear that tense and different light, that hallucination which imposes on space a unanimous fear of the dark and which ceases suddenly when we notice its deceitfulness, just as dreams disappear when we realise we are dreaming.”

    From “Afterglow” in “Fervore di Buenos Aires” (1925)

    Plotter print on Hahnemühle Museum Paper / Edition of ten, variable sizes

  • Mirror Maze, Luzern, Swiss, November 2010

    “It is doubtful whether the world makes sense; and it is even more doubtful that it has a double or triple sense.”

    From “The mirror of the enigmas” in “Altre Inquisizioni” (1952)

    Plotter print on Hahnemühle Museum Paper / Edition of ten, variable sizes

  • Quinta da Regaleira, Sintra, Portugal, March 2011

    “The architecture was pointless. There was an abundance of corridors without an exit, a high unreachable window, a showy door opening onto a cell or a wall, incredibile upside - down staircases with the steps and bannister reversed. Others clinging airily to the side of a monumental wall, finished without ever reaching any place whatsoever, and after two or three flights, died in the upper shadows of the dome.”

    From “L’Immortale” in “L’Aleph” (1949)

    Plotter print on Hahnemühle Museum Paper / Edition of ten, variable sizes

  • Venice, Italy, March 2011

    Unending Rose

    Plotter print on Hahnemühle Museum Paper / Edition of ten, variable sizes

  • Real Alcazar, Sevilla, Spain, March 2011

    “…life and dreams were pages from the same book, and that to read them in their proper order was to live, but to leaf through them was to dream.”

    From “ Time and J. W. Dunne” in “Other Inquisition” (1940)

    Plotter print on Hahnemühle Museum Paper / Edition of ten, variable sizes

  • Real Alcazar, Sevilla, Spain, March 2011

    “Having felt the circle of water in the secret cistern, the perfume of jasmine and honeysuckle, the silence of the sleeping bird, the arch of the entrance hall, the damp – such things, perhaps, are poetry.”

    From “Il Sud” in “Fervore di Buenos Aires” (1923)

    Plotter print on Hahnemühle Museum Paper / Edition of ten, variable sizes