Trebeski - Centorame

Via Crucis
of Trebeschi
When one offers a Via Crucis to the public, immediately it sets off in the mind the conventional categories of religious art, almost as a separate category, reserved to limited and particular spheres.
In fact this conviction represents a prejudice of superficiality ignoring the complete history of Italian art and does not give due account to the fact that it concerns, especially in what is the culmination of the evangelical recount, a scream of suffering and of hope which is always universal. It is the message which concerns mankind, that of a death for a life.
This involves a theme which normally frightens artists but attracts them, from the mists of time, from the first steps of Christian iconography and which is always, due to its nature, of the populace: in fact, it is as much popular as it is universal.
The Via Crucis of Alberto Trebeschi is not an isolated moment during the artist’s search for sense and language but, rather, the result of a long interior voyage which presents during its itinerary moments of investigation and reflexion. Meditation on the Passion of Christ is, essentially and always, also any analysis of one’s own human condition, a profound verification of the whole meaning of one’s personal existential being.
In a justly famous comment on the Via Crucis, the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger held that the leitmotiv of this extraordinary narrative can be compared to the story of the seed of grain. “Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and not die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.” St. John 12:24
Trebeschi is a man who has the roots of his infancy and youth in the fertile earth of Lombardy and Emilia, and is used to observe and study the cycle of death which brings forth life. It is not by chance that the set of the Stations of his Via Crucis represents substantially a vicissitude in which life does not let go entirely the step towards resignation of definitive defeat.
His palette never speaks of the desperation of death which falls definitively on the human condition. The atrocious sufferings of Jesus are the sufferings of man that He shares exactly because his is not a condition of immovable detachment with regard to mankind but, rather, an event of sharing of suffering and, as a consequence, forever open to hope.
The painting of Trebeschi undertakes the difficult lot of transmitting the sense of a God who walks with us and is always, in every phase of the life of man and his history, our contemporary.
Even if from the first of the fifteen Stations the sign and image of the cross impends, Trebeschi’s representation is always open towards life. The very personal and well recognizable usage of colours bears witness to this. This reveals a precise attitude and language. The abundance of chromatic tones of green and blue are meant to signify a precise selection as a sign of hope and opening towards the other life. A metaphysical leap which is not only in art when involved in a holy subject but is in all communication of high spirituality and authentically human.
The expressive language of Trebeschi always maintains a solid course towards the fulfilment of humanity, that which allows one to follow a path which leads one to question legitimately the mystery of the dignity of mankind. He does not fall into current temptations of a nihilistic art which is always easily recognizable, exactly because this trends towards the humiliation of the human element.
This is the attitude of the artist towards mankind in its authenticity and which speaks of his opening towards God. Within the moments of essential interrogation he must find the force to affront arduous and difficult themes without fear of running into the audacity of the new, not having fear of falling into what has already been seen, affronting a theme which has evoke such creative energy. What the artist has suggested is above all a way of finding, within one’s own interior, an opening towards the dimension of mystery and faith.
Trebeschi’s that of a painting of interior landscapes, which whilst having a precise and dominant centre in the narration of the itinerary of the Via Crucis, struggles not to forget human nature in its entirety, even when inexorably arrives the moment of grief and prayer. This concerns a grief which penetrates the heart, not only the mother of the Crucified, but of all men who revive in the authenticity of the death of the Judge of the world.
Trebeschi does not halt in the description of men screaming like lunatics and seeking death. The crowd senses itself in pictorial representation as with the indecision of human conscience.
But those men who observe: on which side do they lie in the matter of the Passion and of the death of Christ. Where are they, where do they place themselves in this story of life and death. A brushstroke of Trebeschi full of a stong line of tension seems to want to push us not to be indifferent, to choose a role, to fall into and relive the scene of the crucifixion and death of God.
Even we are perhaps burdened down by the weight of the cross and, along our path fall down continuously, frequently under the encumbrance of emptiness and nothing. Even we seek the eyes of the Mother which comfort us and we trust that they will uplift us. An evocative and essential painting, coherent in all the Stations of this extremely difficult task.
Little by little as Jesus proceeds under the weight of the cross, until arriving naked at the extreme moment, the artist seems to understand that the pictorial language must become more rarefied, almost so as to describe the silence which impends over the supreme tragedy, over the absolute event of death for life.
One understands therefore that Jesus’ dishonour and insult belongs entirely to our humanity, it is our reply as ungrateful sons of an overabundance of love.
The painter uses grey to cover the sun in a early sundown and black to describe his and our sentiments. This pre-announces a sky from which unexpectedly light and stars have disappeared. A sky without signs and symbols, as in many respects is today’s reality.
Trebeschi has understood that the narration of the Via Crucis always has a contemporary value. It is the perennial actuality of the eternity of God. The painter’s language struggles to adhere to this projection beyond space and time.
There is never, in none of the Stations painted, the obscurity of resignment. There is rather, the understanding that the Sepulchre is empty and that the times to come are a future of light and not the obscurity of the inferi.
Vincenzo Centorame