A statement, in the text written for the installation Slipping some time, Offnes Ateliers gallerie, Berlin 1997, we could easy consider a statement in the text as a declaration of intent of the artist: “going out from a one way context, proposing sights instead of ended form and transforming it in an opened dynamic context: my route”. In another part of the same text he asks himself what is the relation like between water and memory. The shapes in the ice are a condition of stable memory, but a stable memory is a (archaeological) find? a crystallized reality during the time of conscious existence? In that installation, the artist had bound different objects in blocks of ice. Considering water in relation to memory, going from a liquid to solid state memory-crystallizes the existential experience over time, preserving it. A pair of shoes laid in a ice sheet hanging, slowly melts, until water and shoes will fall on the floor. This is an extraordinary art work, where the shoes become the symbol and at the same time the proof of a nomadic existence. An objective reality, a communicated experience. So those shoes, in fact, are nothing else than a portrait of the artist. In Candido's work however there is something else because those shoes have the evocative power of something archaic, almost prehistoric, like the body of a mammoth returned to the contemporary time. In this sense, it acquires the force of a past that was fundamental and at the same time an unconscious destiny, which besides being subjective, I mean the human being who had inhabited the shoes, it becomes collective as a condition of a genre of humanity. That kind of humanity which belongs to the poet I would say. I think about the trip of Lentz in the Lentz of Büchner, the journey in which the existence is lost in knowledge of a vacuum manifest. A journey on foot is without a doubt an existential journey, and it is surprising how deep poignant emotions that image is able to evoke. It is maybe because those shoes have really “walked”, since it belonged to the artist.
Silvano Rutigliano [Ettore Malacarne]