Having escaped the fires of Gehenna, where the algorithm had been a suffocating burden for their restless souls, Elio Rumma’s myriad anthropomorphic, phytomorphic, and zoomorphic silhouettes and metaphysical symbols seem to be drawn into the polyrhythmic nature of jazz music. And going from improvisation, to blues notes and slow harmonic progression, they have already stripped away their matter to return to essence. And, as archetypes and specimens, they are ready to act as intermediaries between Heaven and Earth.

Rumma’s symbols and silhouettes though are nothing than a projection of the artist himself. After breaking the shell of his ego, the artist found himself experiencing the essence of his deepest self, where the much sought-after lightness resides. In this liberation process, he helps himself deciding to burn some of his artworks.

Rumma took his first and crucial steps towards the manifestation of essence in the Himalayas, where he spent five years – where, in numerology, five is the passage from the matter to the spiritual, the progressive ascending movement, the vertical evolution– before travelling to Brazil thanks to cinema. He tied  a long-standing partnership with the Green-Golden Country which lasted twenty years, time when he was spellbound by the Afro-American cults. And this was also thanks to the encounter with the Brazilian artist Rubem Valentim (1922-1991), whose colors and symbols were inspired by Candomblé and Umbanda, and by the xangô axe, symbols of Candomblé. In his “Manifesto Ainda que Tardio” (“Manifesto Even If Late”), written in 1976, Valentim tried to explain his philosophy by describing his effort to find universal communication between the emblems of different African cults. Thus, in the art of Valentim first and Rumma later, geometry once again helps in the purpose of creating sensitive parameters to complement the popular and syncretic expressions of Brazil. The silhouettes and symbols thus become hieratic, solemn, immobile, and ritualistic, as the sacred ones of Byzantine art during the Middle Age  or the Egyptian art still earlier had been, both characterized by austerity and composure.

Thus, Rumma opened the dance with Yemanjà, the goddess of love and mother of all the Orishas—the intense energies cloaking the visible and the invisible—and with the archetypal silhouettes and symbols of his artworks. The latter swirling in an anarchic and eternal search for harmony, on wooden boards or cavass resembling strips of a desert land within alchemical circles or squares, which host the bright colored silhouttes and symbols with no hierarchy. The desert is the void and, however, the void is not absence, but essence, the presence of the self. The void is a silent sound, and music for active ears and a dance for bodies transformed into feathers in the wind, that same as Yemanjà’s dance  calling for love… and here only those who, having definitively cast off the guise of art-consumers, sublimate themselves into spect-actors.

In this graceful dance, then, the archetypal silhouttes and symbols are aligned at a rhythmic distance from each other, each safeguarding its own vital space. And yet, they mirror one another and, in these features and positions, allow themselves to be admired, and as if they were “anarchic great-grandchildren of the punishing Abbot, they move toward a new Flatland eventually refounded and cyclically refoundable from the foundations,” writes with delight Bruno Aller, artist and curator of Elio Rumma’s solo exhibition in Salerno in 2019.

Rumma uses acrylics on wooden boards or canvas to create his artworks, and his silhouttes and symbols are carved, not coincidentally, from the malleable and lightweight balsa wood (Ochroma pyramidale), a tree of the Malvaceae family (subfamily Bombacoideae), which is abundant in Central and South America. As we mentioned here above, by exploring the universality of sign and shape, the artist achieves a lightness made possible by a rediscovered balance between matter and spirit.

The nonconformist artist Elio Rumma was born in Salerno in 1946, and studied Philosophy at the Federico II University of Naples. In 1967, he founded the Publishing house Rumma Editore with his brother Marcello, and together with his brother, they organised numerous important art exhibitions, such as the one dedicated to Arte Povera in Amalfi in 1968. After his brother’s death, Elio turned to music, raving about jazz and rock. He explored different worlds and languages: the Seventh art, Cinema, as a screenwriter, director, and editor (he shot some documentaries for the Italian Tv RAI and developed close friendships with Bernardo and Giuseppe Bertolucci, Age & Scarpelli, Ettore Scola, Gillo Pontecorvo); as well as the visual arts. In 1972, he founded Filmstudio in Trastevere (Rome) and undertook numerous journeys, but the ones that would change his life and art were the five years spent in the Himalayas and later in Brazil. “Apparently,” the artist explains, “the ancient Tibetan culture of Bon and Afro-Brazilian Candomblé belong to very distant universes, but, as a matter of fact, they have common foundations in shamanism and animistic cult of the forces of nature, where there is no room for selfishness, but rather a sense of osmosis with nature.” Hence the title of his current solo exhibition: Absence Essence/Rigpa, where for Rigpa, “Rigpa,” a fundamental Tibetan word which means “nature of the mind” or “pure awareness” in Buddhism.

Elio Rumma’s current solo exhibition, whose curator is Anna Bruno, will be held at the Galleria Pagea Arte Contemporanea, Via Concilio 99 Angri (Sa) from March 5 to April 5 in