Significant Souls

Howard Zinn (from his introduction to Significant Souls):

“What attracts me to [Fiore’s] work is his profound understanding of the connection between art and social struggle.  To join my work in history with his paintings is a striking expression of that connection.

I have always cherished the work of artists, aside from the intrinsic pleasure they bring to the world,   because art brings a special intensity and passion to any idea which inspires it. It intrudes in the great imbalance of power in society – the concentration of wealth and force in the hands of a few (what C. Wright Mills called “the power elite”) by adding the special power of art to that of individuals and communities struggling against great odds.

The artist – the poet, the novelist, the musician, the painter - does something beyond what those of us who work with prose can do.  The artist takes the viewer, the listener, outside the realm of the real, the immediate, the possible, and evokes new possibilities.  I think of the slogan of the French student rebels in 1968: “Soyez realiste, demandez l’impossible” (Be realistic, demand the impossible).

The artist takes us beyond the here and now, beyond the madness of the world, beyond war, violence, poverty, injustice, and puts those horrors in perspective, makes us understand that they are temporary manifestations, that they are not inherent in human nature, not permanent and immovable.

The artist may not lend his or her work consciously to the struggle for a different world, and yet, by transcending the immediate, leads us to think that way.  When the artist consciously joins that struggle, as Patrick Fiore does in his paintings, he or she is defying the warnings of those who say: stick to your art, don’t meddle in the affairs of the world.  The artist is declaring: “I am not just an artist, I am a citizen, I am a human being, and in fact my work as an artist is secondary to my existence as thinking, feeling member of the human race.”