For about fifteen years now, along with his work as a painter, Zigaina has devoted himself also to the field of graphics. In 1965, when he began, his prints were few in number, but the pace of their production increased as Zigaina investigated more and more widely the medium, achieving a suffering and secret poetry, the discovery of a world not very different from that of his painting, the difference being that between the secretness, the bite, the harsh wound, the austerity of the black line and the opulence, extroversion, light and magic of colon Zigaina's color, too, has a Veneto background and ancestry, while his graphic work is marked by a Nordic severity, hardness and dreaminess.

It is necessary to remember, at the outset, that in all Zigaina's work the graphic element has seemed central, forming a kind of loon in the painting, a private web, a strong and extending support, vvhether seen in the clear spokes or bars of bicycles, in fences and wagons, the tangles or the dark clusters of trunks and roots, the stern cadences of interiors and «dormitories». And we must not forget also the very beautiful and continuing production of drawings, which, taken together, form a corpus to be numbered among the most powerful, severe and poetic of any contemporary artist. From the beginning, Zigaina stood out because of the strenght of his graphic sign, so rich in expression, content, and mystery that it proves to be a specific and predominant element of his language

And I believe that it is precisely from this function and nature of the sign that the fundamental aim of his work stems: to participate in the flow of reality, to capture its civil and human meaning, reveal its color cruelty, and death, with the g eatest expressive freedom, in other words, with the greatest poetic truth. Zigaina says: "the sign must be the vehicle of something further", vehicle of itself. of its own birth in the artist's dark inner life, and of something further, a reality interpreted and experienced, a point where reality and dream coincide, where things, events, acts of history and of life gather into symbol, are expressed in imagination. It is Zigaina's graphic sign, so vital and imaginative, allusive and real, that distinguished the artist from his fellow realists during the early years of his work, and then distinguished him from the informal painters, and finally from everyone else. On it rests the Nordic spirit of an artist born in frontier territory between two  civilizations, but central to Europe; his homage to Durer is not accidental.

In his painting Zigaina surrounds that sign (and, in it, that spirit) with a great chromatic skill and achievement, with a thickly luminous material, w~ith those tones, in short, so balanced, natural, lyrical, and imaginative that are his glory as a painter. Thus in the memory and in their poetry the cold and impassioned greens remain, with the flash of the reds and whites in his «neo-realist» period, and the thick germinations of yellows, browns, rusts of his period closest to the informal, and then the taut red or yellow or blue membranes, the sky-colors, the blacks and browns and the grey backgrounds of the butterflies, as if that network of the sign had been enfolded in a throbbing body, in flesh. But while these extraordinary events take place in his painting, in his graphic work there is not simply a translation into black and white, an attempt to create tone with a thicker or thinner line, as is usually the case; instead, we find a drying-out of everything that had settled on the nerves and bones of those bodies. a reduction to the open,sensitive and dessicated essence of that network, so the graphic work does not seem the r educed counterpart, or the negative, of the painting, but rather its cruel interior, its desperate outcry. I know no other member of this generation of whom it can be said so confidently that his classics are the Germans: Durer, there in his supreme empyrean with his reality and his vision, Otto Dix, here on the earth of his horrors, of hus wretchedness, human torments and decadence.

Taken as a whole, Zigaina's engraved work, though it develops the same themes as his painting, also moves away from it and utters a kind of dark subterranean sound, a broad lament, which complements and accompanies the paintig and, like it, seems a great meditation and a nocturnal fantasy, unfolding through images, on the history and fate of man. Like all true poetic meditation, it is addressed to the past, based on the documents of history, thc war camps, the embattled caves, the cultivated plains, on excavations and graves, on the natural cycle and the years of childhood from which the past emerges. With this emerging there comes unity, fusion between the individual and the social, between personal existence and the existence of others, between the depths of the psyche and the junctures of history, between the dream which is the artist's experience and the reality which is the experience of manhind.

To give images to this difficult conjunction, to this necessary union, has been the great, laborious, ceaseless task of an artist who, like Zigaina, could in no way elude his ci~il destiny, his own human pity, his thirst for justice. The past emerges as if to uncover a tomb: bones come out, memories, insects, horror; and if the graveyard is a military cemetery, if it is an old battlefield, bayonets are also there, and bomb fragments, projectiles' spectacles, skulls. These are Zigaina`s memories and the reality of his native country' and they are naturally mixed with the grass, the gardens, the canals' the rows of mulberry trees and willows cropped after pruning.

Thus history has laid its horrendous signals as the butterfly deposits its eggs: a generative process, which has a repulsive aspect It seems a constant conflict between generation and death, between life that opens, grass that grows, roots that nourish, and the fatal and cruel corruption of all matter, the transformation of that same life into inert residue, skeleton, shards. In reality, the only sense that runs through all the images is that of cruelty, repulsion, wretchedness: the feeling of death. Even the butterfly is a marvelous symbol of it; in fact, it is present in a process, and through a symbolism, opposed to the one usually employed by poets, when the butterfly becomes the bearer of wonder in the splendor, beauty, the delicate perfection that develops from the caterpillar, the airy light of its puttering, soul, spirit, or freedom, born from dark life. Here, the other part of the process is revealed, symbolically reversed: the great, sumptuous, funereal insect generates worms, larvae, a creeping condition, subterranean and blind: not soul or spirit, but messenger of death, generator of death.

Almost always, in fact, in Zigaina's work even the sky, that homogeneous and indifferent space, is filled with a monstruous agitation, a mortal sign: the great butterfly, the splotch of smoke, the giant insect of the "visitation", the cloud of bone, of wings, of claws, nails, spectacles, buckles, like a horrible dream visualized, the space-ship; from the sky descend only seeds of corruption, signals of condemnation, death-kites.

But within this dark destiny Zigaina's work affords also a constant denunciation of the cruelty that corrupts and wounds man. His «anatomies» are the invention of a powerful emotive force, a rationalized horror, they offer a real symbology of how man can become reduced, under the pressure of history, of violence and of evil, to the sensitive matter of bones, muscles, nerves. Anatomy laid bare reveals not so much the wonderful organization and functionality of nature as the miserable loss of nobility and harmony and, if it can be said to belong to nature, it is because of its corruptibile form. Anatomy can lose all human semblance and simulate a landscape: the bundles of nerve-tissue, the cluster of blood-vessels, the sharp line of the bones like paths, canals or hills; but not because man is the model of the cosmos: he is rather an inert fragment of the matter that composes it In this simile it is not a secret plan that appears, but a dark chaos, which is the result, on the metaphysical level, of the nothingness of the whole, on the existential level of the cruel dehumanization to which man is uninterruptedly subjected.

These are terrible, traumatic images, but they are the inventions of a poet, truths uttered with the transfigured language of a fearful spirit, loving and grieving. A single thread, a single great idea unites then the memory of the father, who returns a skeleton but with the hard, sacred hand of the carpenter, death in the semblance of insect who comes to pay a visit, the wind running over the desert of Redipuglia, the rubble of jawbones and wings, worms and the nightbird that are hidden in the grass, the prisoner subjected to torture, the anatomical preparation of a heart joined to the hairy feet of an insect, the butterfly's eggs which have been dropped into an ear or a gaping mouth; they are united by the repellent, cruel, mortal. and doomed sense of reality.

In 1965 when Zigaina began to trace his line over the etching plate, that line so vibrant and clear, so charged with expression, against the white of the page, at that moment there came into his painting a different view of reality, more complicated, rich, driven to capture all signals, events, truths deposited in its dark zone, its depths. At this development, there was some fairly inexact talk about expressionism, symbolism. It is hard to define the inner motives of poets, impossible to condense into a formula the resulting poetic images. One could only refer, as Pasolini did, to a "delirium of inspiration"; the image took on some aspects of dream, memory, timelessness, condensation, symbolization, but it maintained its reality, its «delirious» reality, in fact As Zigaina agreed, it was born from a relationship of "tenderness-horror" with himself, with the world.

I believe the two terms of this relationship are the basis of what Zigaina has experienced and of everytlung he has created; they say something more, and different, from the generally used, and by now trite terms, love-hate; they express, in fact, the whole extent of a delicate and somehow resented relationship with life; they express sensitivity, emotion, and the way of penetrating the hidden recesses, abandoned, forgotten, where humble, daily, toiling life celebrates its secret glories, and at the same time, the escape, desperation, the horror, in fact, at the destruction of these glories that is daily carried out. At a certain point, in the necessity of touching further and more deeply and expressing in poetry such forbidden areas, the "delirium of inspiration" is born, which thus becomes the linguistic and imaginative constant of all Zigaina's graphic work so far.

Only a few pages in the first years, the signs still steeped in the violence and the distortion initiated with the theme of the "dormitories". Then, as the experience becomes more frequent, the sign gradually lightens and, precise, it follows with clarity and certitude the suggestions, the illusions, the terrors of the spirit. In 1968 the "goat's head" theme appears, which is also translated into some beautiful canvases with the title «The goat and the hearb,. These are the first "anatomies", here human and animal, with the delicate, luminous and horrid sense of their conjunction: but what chromatic beauty entrances in painting remains bare on the engraved page, where corruption becomes tragic as the sign and the sense of death are more naked. The year 1971 was a time of intense graphic occupation, producing engravings of great beauty. This is when the «Queen bee» appeared, and the «Butterfly laying eggs», the larvae, other imaginary insects, the nocturnal bird; there was already a fervor of invention, relationships, ideas that were to furnish the thematic material for the later works.

To this year belong also the two masterpieces, the «Homage to Picasso» and the «Homage to Durer", each with three variant versions. In the former, the imagination has great tone and drama, the mother and dead child from "Guernica" are counterpoised, in her affltude of imploration and outcry, to the great monstruous insect and the mixture of larvae, elytra, talon-like feet (one of which has a human digit), femurs, rusty bayonets; the biological cycle of the insect, flying individual, eggs, larva, caterpillar, is a cycle of death; this insight-fantasy, which is the foundation of almost all Zigaina's graphic work contains something incomprehensible, mysterious, incongruent and also true, which is the privilege of poetry, in its metaphorical capacity, to discover and make clear to ale A sole drama and a sole historic truth, a sole human perdition and suffering unite, within this ambiguous sense of death, the victims of the old war and those of the new one, the corpses of Redipuglia and those of Guernica. And Picasso is seen at the highest point where civil morality coincides with formal revolution; the wing of that morality hovers over Zigaina's page, where, as in all the moments of his greatest expressive power, morality and poetry are naturally joined.

In the "Homage to Durer", the owl, taken from the "Madonna and child",. becomes the protagonist of the page, where, in contrast with the clarity and precision of the graphic sign, it spreads its nocturnal character. The owl, with its great wide eyes, round and motionless, had already appeared as «Bird in the grass» in a 1968 painting and was to return, with characteristics closer to this one of the "Homage to Dürer" in three plates of 1973 with the same title, always bearing the sense of darkness, concealment, ambush. It is worth noting that the Acherontia atropos, the «death's head moth» is a nocturnal insect. In these years Zigaina's work is under the sign of the night; its Nordic character is underlined and, in some way, its tragically romantic aspect. But here night is only the time when death approaches, when the "visitation" occurs, the «interrogation» takes place, dreams are composed. To night's darkness there corresponds (or there persists into the day) the darkness of the earth's passages where insects take refuge, and graves, gestations, thick grass. On this atmosphere and on this lofty, funereal, at times epic tone, there is the conjunction, the interlacing between natural events and psychological events, between the symbology of terrestrial life, the interior unconscious, and the social happening.

In the decade that began in 1971 and is now ending, Zigaina's graphic activity became very intense; the themes of which we have given some examples and some attempts at interpretation multiplied, mingled, fused, and in some plates achieve climactic points of tense poetry. To mention a few examples: "Nocturnal butterfly-sequence", "Two studies for anatomy", "From the hill of Redipuglia" from 1973; "For Venice" in 1974;"Visitation-nocturne" of 1976; "A radiant morning-visitation" of 1977; "The dream butterfly" or "Fire in the garden" of 1978; "`Towards the lagoon" and all the other plates of 1980.

This expressive fullness achieved by Zigaina's graphic style does not shirk even the slightest variation of the drama that his human and civil anxiety has led him to depict. The line, sometimes thick and dense, darkening, and sometimes distinct, luminous and simple, rests on the page, engraves it, animates it, and with the space thus created gives life to a form so intense ad complex that it must belong to this loffiest achievements of contemporary graphic art It gives birth to a broad, dramatic narration, composed of fantastic and poetic insights" where the Veneto earth, natural cycles, history's indifference, power's cruelty and a love of mankind form a single knot, utter a solemn, lacerated harmony.

Roberto Tassi
Traslation by William Weaver