EnzoSchillizzi

Enzo Schillizzi was born in 1955 in San Costantino Albanese, a small Arbëresh village in the province of Potenza, on the slopes of the Pollino. There were eight children at home.

The seminary and the Academy

At eleven he was sent to the seminary, at the monastery of Santa Maria Odigitria in San Basile, Calabria. He completed his classical studies at the Greek Abbey of San Nilo in Grottaferrata. His gift for drawing showed early and took him to the Academy of Fine Arts in Castrovillari. When he received his diploma, he tore it up: academic rules were not for him.

The house at the top of the village

He came back to San Costantino and settled in his father’s house, where he would live alone once his brothers and sisters had moved away and his parents had died. His studio was the ground floor of that house, in the upper part of the village. From the 1970s painting became his constant occupation. He played the guitar, read the classics, wrote stories and poems, and translated songs from English and Italian into Arbëresh.

“I live mostly by breathing”

That was his answer to anyone who asked how he made a living. He did not look for exhibitions or a market. He gave his paintings away, or let them go for a little money, sometimes for a hot meal, depending on his mood. He painted on card and scraps of paper of every size, and with whatever was at hand: wine and coffee too. Hence the line that “there is no house in San Costantino that does not keep a painting by Enzo”.

Like a folk tale

His paintings hold the village: its rites and views, life in the fields, the Nusazit, the firework puppets of the patron saint’s feast. There are the brigands of post-unification Basilicata, portraits of relatives and acquaintances, still lifes, angels with guitars. And his readings of the great painters, from Velázquez to Picasso.

He worked with everything: ink, pencil, charcoal, pastel, watercolour, tempera and oil, the wood of his reliefs. From the late 1990s he also painted on walls, on façades and inside homes, in San Costantino, San Giorgio Lucano and Senise. His early work leans on an archaic, popular realism; later his line grows more concise, and religious and hermetic motifs alternate with everyday ones.

July 2009

Enzo died in July 2009. The municipality soon started research to document his work: family and friends helped track the paintings down, and owners opened their homes so they could be photographed. The first catalogue came out in 2010. The rest is kept by the village, one house at a time.