The Kafkaesque quote – placed in epigraph to the works of art by Prisco De Vivo (figurative artist and brilliant poet and designer) and to the verses of Raffale Piazza (well-known poet and journalist) - reminds us of a certain predilection of the Prague writer Franz Kafka (Prague 1883 – Kierling, Vienna, 1924) for the night and for the dark. Indeed for black, which could potentially transform into white. Not yet, at first glance, the black of the imminent Nazism and Fascism and the darkness of the concentration and extermination camps, where Jews, children, madmen, gypsies and the different are massed, to typify them and study them through a medicine and a science that are obscurely bending to the Manifesto of Race. The Kafkaesque black – which Prisco De Vivo finds and takes up again today – is, rather, that of the covers of old elementary school notebooks, with their dark color and their squared pages, which awaited pencil strokes and pastel stains. Pencils and strokes that, now, transform the white pages with dark stains. Metamorphoses of white into dark and of shades of dark toward white, transformations of matter and of glances. After all, in the wheel of metamorphoses, of every metamorphosis, “the man sits in the eminent part, a beast lies at the bottom, a half man and half beast descends from the left, and a half beast and half man ascends from the right”, as in the dreamlike glances of Fra Giordano Bruno Nolano. And the mind, faced with this book given to us by De Vivo and Piazza, cannot help but go from Homer to Rowling, passing through the North African Apuleius (2nd century AD), up to Dante, Bruno, Pasolini and, above all, as now happens in this volume, which we are rereading, to Kafka.In fact, before the eye of De Vivo there is not the blue of the eight “notebooks of words” by Kafka, published on the basis of what Max Brod offered. In those notebooks, the Prague writer had frescoed the room that is in each of us at night. Written between 1917 and 1919, shortly before writing that long revealing document, which will be the Letter to the Father, those small notebooks – in which the writer seems willing to give vent to even the most hidden and scabrous corners of his heart – open our eyes to the meaning of darkness and night. But did Kafka really like the night, the dark, the black? Josef K., the protagonist of The Trial (written by Kafka between 1914 and 1917 and published posthumously in 1925) finds himself subjected, following an unspecified accusation, to a trial: it takes place in the attic of an old, squalid, dark and labyrinthine apartment building. Here he also meets a painter, named Titorelli who, despite being very poor, works as a portraitist for the court, so he knows perfectly well how all the mechanisms of the court and the Law work, but then he will be evicted with his paintings anyway. In The Trial, closed, dark and asphyxiating places prevail, like the court. But the figure of Titorelli is precisely the one that can most entice the eye of Kafka, but also of De Vivo, to look, even at night. From Kafka’s papers – which were saved by his friend and executor Max Brod, who took them with him first to Turkey and then to Israel, fleeing the German invasion of Prague – this very short story was published (against the will of the Author, who had entrusted them to him with the clause not to edit). It is a work of writing-meditation that, like others, could have been developed in notebooks and notes. At night, in fact, the figure of an insomniac presents the caretaker, who reads and questions himself in the darkness of the night, almost watching over the questions of those who cannot or do not manage to sleep, and perhaps he is also guarding, that is, watching over the unconscious sleep of the sleepers: «And you are awake, you are one of the caretakers, you find the next one by shaking the burning wood in the pile of twigs next to you. Why do you keep watch? One must keep watch, they say. One must be present" (Franz Kafka 1920, Italian translation by E. Pocar).If one must be present, here is the black and the light of our artist. However, all this must not happen now before our eyes of flesh and the eyes of our mind. Because, if we look closely, the dark and the shadows of the night are never pleasant for Kafka, but they happen because of insomnia, which does not let you sleep and, often, instead of calming and reassuring, instills fear. After dark pages, also in the volume by Prisco De Vivo and Raffaele Piazza, the first spot of color; indeed - as Manuela Gandini rightly notes on page 11 - here is the new "creation" of the artist: a face without features, but only with one open eye ((⏱️=400)) empty. It is the transfigured gaze of the artist, who thus undertakes his own peculiar metamorphosis of glances from darkness to light, from indistinct shadows to somatic features, not without always introducing new darkness, new nights, new scenarios, new ...
