Marco Nieli — Apophatic Art Practice and Research

EKPHRASIS I, 121 ecphrastic carmina); EKPHRASIS II, 128 ecphrastic carmina in the 4 styles, with some haiku

The project envisions a descriptive yet lyrical itinerary, in the broadest sense of the term, through the repertoire of Roman wall painting in the capital and the Vesuvian area, from the Fourth Style model represented by the Domus Aurea to the latest finds from the Stabian villas and Somma Vesuviana, Italy. The model of ekphrastic poetry obviously dates back to Pausanias and Philostratus, but I have updated it in light of the surreal-mythological gaze of American poets, especially those of Deep Image and Black Mountain (with E. Dickinson and Hilda Doolittle as essential teachers).

In my opinion, the poem offers an unusual glimpse into the depth and breadth of this artisanal production in the Vesuvian area (which I also studied from a technical perspective in my thesis), which should be considered a true Renaissance of painting ante litteram. Local artisans (especially those of the Fourth Style, but not only) experimented across the board, inventing perspective, still life, and the compendiaria (a technique that preceded Impressionism). Their extraordinary color palette should therefore be seen as a particular form of Mannerism, eclectic and with peaks of unsurpassed virtuosity.

The consideration of the process of material transformation/mutation due to the effects of the natural disaster and the work of the elements gives the perception (followed by the lyrical reworking) a particular, processual value. Fragment against fragment, ut pictura poesis I intended to explore the abysses and depths in which these two gazes meet, that of the stupendous Leda embracing the swan and that of the astonished spectator-archaeologist of today. The dripping/blurring of the pigment on the wall, the alteration of the yellow ochre into baked red (“Pompeian”) due to the temperature of the eruption, together with the capricious inflorescences caused by the salt crystals caused by the infiltration of water, spontaneously found an objective, formal correlate in the arrangement of the words on the white page, with the alternating spaces-silences marking the intermittencies of the line and of the language (of the brush, as of life). In this sense, the “field composition” of so many American poets and the Japanese haiku have provided me with valid operational coordinates as indicators to convey through a fluid and essential poetical language the depth (and otherness) of the Vesuvius' vision of the Roman world.

The collection includes haiku, songs and “covers” by many English, U.S. and Italian poets (central the lyrical-mimetic reflection on Leopardi's Ginestra today, in the light of the most recent findings of the theory of evolution) Poetry is the interaction between natural and cultural processes, that constitute the specific mutagenic imperfection of our beings, as fragile creatures of chance, in a boundless universe that is still, ultimately, mysterious to our eyes.

Marco Nieli was born in Naples in 1967. As a teacher, he worked in several countries in the global south (including Argentina and Ethiopia) and traveled to Ethiopia, Kenya, and Tanzania to trace the origins of the human species.

Like all his human peers, he has accomplished both little and much in his life: traveled, learned (written and read, participated in poetry readings), planted trees, fathered a daughter, loved.

After all, he doesn't consider himself to have accomplished much, metaphysically speaking, like all his human peers, after all.

Over the years, he has developed a vital interest in classical civilizations, revisited from an archaeo-logical and anthropological perspective.

A lover of Anglo-American and Russian poetry, as well as Japanese haiku, he has revitalized the genre of ekphrastic (descriptive) poetry, following in the footsteps of American field composition and the surrealist avant-garde. The material processes of the composition and disintegration of the Pompeian tectoria (plasters) and pigmenta (colors) have been “spontaneously” translated, in his poetic research, into the “spaced” musicality of versification. The result is an open and fluid composition, seeking unstable and shifting balances on the page, in a close combat with the horror vacui.

Techniques used: enjambement and Dickinsonian fragment, montage and juxtaposition, haiku and deep image. Through the sizzling of the image on the retina or on the blank page, glimpses of satori or alchemical albedo open, in his ekphrastic carmina inspired by Roman painting of the Vesuvian area, onto mystical-materialistic scenarios worthy of Juan de la Cruz's Grande Nada.

He published Ekphrasis I for Artestesa in 2025.

Ekphrasis II, 128 poems in the four styles, with some haiku is the second part, just published, of a larger collection of fragments on Roman painting in the Vesuvian area currently underway.