Saverio Ungheri questions modernity. And draws it towards the incredible. A modernity that is no longer semiological. He questions the avant-garde movements and reads them. Saverio Ungheri questions painting, sculpture, architecture, the other arts and inventions. And he does not represent them, he reads them. His is not only art, not only invention. It is poetry of art and of invention. It is the writing of this poetry.

Saverio Ungheri questions the machine and technics. He explores them and crosses through them. He does not mediate them. He does not inscribe them in the common of knowledge, sense or truth. No mnemo-machine nor mnemo-technics. No psycho-mechanicism nor psycho-technicism. No technology, with which the discourse of death is updated and constitutes the epoch, with all its social, economic, political and moral coverings.

Saverio Ungheri questions civilization and does not represent it. No zoological approaches. No animal imagery. And no value holds before the absolute value, intellectual quality, towards which the machine and technics turn as they are written.

What is left of civilization without its erasure or destruction anymore and without the grave and grievous duty of remembering? What is left of the avant-garde movements, without the ideologies that supported the propaganda and group organization anymore? What is left of modernity, without cathedrals or garrisons? What is left of the city of Rome, in the sixty years that Saverio Ungheri has been wandering its length and breadth in his meditations and narrations through the galaxies? What pause and what modulation favour the writing of the search? What time qualifies the rhythm?

What is written of history returns both the symbolic as well as the literal of experience. By reading them. And what is written as it is done returns the capital, the intellectual thing. For this revolution towards the intellectual thing, the combination and the brain of the combination are important, even in what seems to be enunciated as an organ: a heart, a lung, an eye or an ear.

There is nothing that interests Saverio Ungheri for aesthetic, poetic, literary, religious, historical or cultural reasons. Where others pursue mystery, Saverio Ungheri introduces the original inscription of things. In their narration. In their narrative reason. In the reason of the other. In their qualification.

Saverio Ungheri’s ancient and solemn sophistry brings philosophy without philosophical discourse, rhetoric without literary discourse, lyrical poetry without sentimentalism and poetry without poetic discourse back towards complexity, beyond the linguistic tangle and, by this, the route of infinity, towards simplicity. Prophesy inspires Saverio Ungheri’s itinerary as his condition. Until his cipher.

There is no tracing of the divine or the human. Saverio Ungheri does not oppose brilliance to what mythological, Junghian vulgarisation and idiots’ metaphysics call the religions of the Mediterranean. He does not need to represent two and three, the object, God, the other. He does not need to spatialize the word, the family, the memory or the city.

North and South are the body and the scene of the word, two, which does not become maternal, harmony and disharmony, the equal and unequal, in short, that original opening from which things proceed. An unknowable relation. Without origin. Hell and heaven. Thus the cave does not dwell in hell. And hell is not maternal. The cave is not maternal.

Here is Saverio Ungheri’s hill. You can go up and down along his road. The road proceeds from high low, from relation. But you go neither upwards nor downwards. Going down and going up. Coming and Going. Like the wind. Like the wave. Enter the cave, the grotto, the den, the pit. The symbol, the letter and the cipher no longer belong to the sybil or to Pythia.

Saverio Ungheri’s ancient house, the house of what is to come, lies here. You may be bewildered, dismayed or even puzzled, but then you reflect and perhaps begin to understand and catch on. A room next to another, on one side, and another room, on the other side. And then others. And others still. Go down, go through, go up. Are these rooms small or large? Dark or light? They are rooms that live from Saverio Ungheri’s works.

You have no chance of becoming inebriated. Each work questions you, provokes you, leaves you thinking, meditating and reflecting. Near each work appear strips and tips of civilization. What you have left before entering, is narrated and written here. And here it finds its meaning, its learning, its truth and its value. Real navigation begins here and makes its début here. And memory finds its way, which is no longer circular, linear and self-destructive.

Saverio Ungheri’s mockery of the black hole and the black continent is absolute. It becomes supreme, or original irony. Beyond dramaturgy. Beyond liturgy. Beyond polemology. The drive of things towards quality excludes animation. And the mockery is also extended to the two centuries of Enlightenment, with its alternative between all light and all dark. A mockery of logo-thermo-dynamics, in all its political, sociological and anthropological applications, in all its circular revolutions, in all its changes, surmountings, reversals, rifts, conflicts, controversies, and in all its bewildering and devastating contentiousness. A mockery also of logo-telematics. This second industrial revolution is also presented, represented and propagated in the guise of Western discourse, which denies it.

In Saverio Ungheri’s itinerary, the body and the scene are not the machine and the technics of thermodynamics and telematics, according to the gnostic model. In Saverio Ungheri’s writing, art and invention are tributaries of the science of the word. Without scientism. And without scientific discourse inscribed in the rut of Western discourse.

And life, which stands out in and from Saverio Ungheri’s cave, is original. Like the word. And every form of vitalism, the food of thanatophagy, is derided.

The navel of Delphi is the object of the word here, the very condition of the cave. The navel is not maternal either. The navel cannot represent or describe the original either. Thus, Saverio Ungheri, a Mediterranean and European master, can entrust Leonardo’s fine lesson to the third millennium.

Saverio Ungheri’s Eden is arithmetical, it is not dominated by eroticism, covered with demonology or clothed in that archaism that always accompanies the idea of origin. Stories, anecdotes, poems, like myths and legends, belong to a qualifying narration, without the negative of time, the idea of the end of time and without associating time with the economy of evil, sin and incest.

Saverio Ungheri’s Eden is a truly artificial, or intellectual, paradise, with no more naturalism, “drugology” or substantialization.

Infinity dwells in Saverio Ungheri’s cave. Infinity is not real but actual. What is sought, what happens and what is written as Saverio Ungheri narrates is never real nor natural. Even the real is unreal. The contingent, with its miracles, is unreal. Life is neither real nor natural.

No spiritual metaphor supporting fictitious biology or fictitious zoology. But automation, as the intellectualisation of things, as an intellectual odyssey towards absolute quality.

Consider astralism. What does it tell you, above all, if not that the word cannot be spatialized, and that life does not have to be denied by following utopia and hence pure spatiality? Astralism: the sky and paradise without the paganism of two centuries of genocidal, Enlightened revolutions.

Astralism: energy is the act of speech, the act of navigation. Astralism: philology is not enough, linguistics — Saverio Ungheri’s linguistics — are needed for things to be written. And, with Saverio Ungheri, before things are written, they are narrated. And they are narrated by abstraction.

The window of life offers things as they begin. And the door of life offers things as they make their début. The beauty of the window is in the beginning of things and in the contradiction that cannot be overcome and hence provides the real structure of commerce. The beauty of the door lies in the very act with which it is flung open to difference and variety. Without change or transit. The beauty of difference is neither real or natural. And, through difference and variety, the things that happen as they are done, are written, with the other language. Where is that indifference towards beauty that brought evil, sin and incest into the paradise of the avant-garde movements, making paradise real and natural?

Calabria, Rome, the galaxies. And astralism: nothing is localized any more, no one is subject to death. Astralism: Calabria’s lot and destiny. The lot and destiny of the word. Intellectual navigation. Without weights. Without gravity.

The grandfather who was a painter. The myth. The “attic full of paintings and drawings”. And papers, rough drawings and sketches in the cupboards. His grandfather “loved the theatre”. And what about olive trees? “Olive trees are the trees of my life….The olive tree is a living tree”.

People come and go. The object of the word is neither fixed nor immobile. Migration defines the gerund of life. “I stayed until I was eighteen. I couldn’t wait to get away from the village”. It is strange: in his intellectual life, Saverio Ungheri does not meet his master; yet, “Paternity must not be disowned in art”. Of course, paternity. “My father died in my arms”. Are his works there to revive him? Paternity is the very instance of nomination, with which things are numbered and become arithmetical as they are narrated, and acquire value as they are written and read.

“If an artist is able to draw, he does not need any other means than his hand”. Which hand? What means does his hand have? What instruments does it have? Intellectual means, intellectual instruments. And devices that make these means and these instruments draw navigation towards the cipher.

“When you acquire the rules, then take on and conquer things, you return them through your work: and it becomes easy, without you realising”. Elipsis, hyperbole and parable reach the symbol, the letter and the cipher. “Painting is the work of angels, it brings you joy”. Angels. Joy. The work is worth the message. And life is worth the mission. It is impossible to understand anything of Saverio Ungheri’s text without Calabria.