What makes us profoundly human? The ability to dream, the desire to create beauty? Compassion, attentiveness, care for others?
And what happens when care also becomes a profession, medicine?
Perhaps then the gaze widens. It learns to observe the world without presuming to explain it. Simply by welcoming it.
This is the gaze of Alessandro Pumo, physician, painter and writer. A gaze that questions the fate of the body, the things that have disappeared, and the boundaries of islands. One that moves through painting, poetry and fiction, driven by the same curiosity about existence.
In his paintings, figures and landscapes hold stories that are only hinted at. Colour takes its liberties, forms elude definition, with a lightness that never overlooks what lies beneath the surface.
L’œil qui regarde le monde: this was the title of the international exhibition in Montpellier in which Alessandro took part. A title he might well have chosen himself.
His studio is a small attic with three glass walls overlooking the rooftops of Catania.
His paintings also inhabit Fra le Righe, the home where his wife, Leda, explores the art of hospitality.
At the entrance, The Philosopher and the Truth seems to hold a conversation that has never quite ended. In the rooms, other paintings meet the gazes of travellers they have never known.
It is the art of bringing meaning back into everyday life.
And something remains between the lines.
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Further Reading: Il destino del corpo, Nuova IPSA Editore, 2002, with an afterword by Manlio Sgalambro; Il posto vuoto delle cose scomparse, Istituto Italiano di Cultura, Naples, 2003, International “Nuove Lettere” Prize; Isole, poetry collection, 2020; L’œil qui regarde le monde, international exhibition, Montpellier, 2022; La verità dura solo pochi minuti, solo exhibition, Catania, 2025.