The texts that the artist chooses for the erasing operation are initially excerpts from newspapers, on which he intervenes by deleting the words of the text and leaving only a few, selected words legible. In this way the semantic fabric of the original text is modified and radically re-interpreted, bringing out meanings extraneous to the original text. In those years Isgrò seems to want to work on syntax and meaning, in a certain sense freeing the text of its primary function and operating according to a constructive and not at all destructive process, as it might appear to a superficial glance. Soon the artist moved on to the erasing of complete texts and books, including the choice of publication as an integral part of the conceptual aspect of the entire operation, as in the case of the famous series of encyclopedias: working, in fact, on the Treccani, on the Larousse encyclopedia, on the British and Soviet encyclopedia, Isgrò enriches his work with a political value, transforming the erasure into a tool for investigating the relationship between knowledge and authority. Over the years, the act of erasing enters into dialogue not only with contemporary international artistic research attributable to the field of Conceptual Art but, even more deeply, with the languages and history of painting. A similar procedure - of opening up meanings through a gesture of apparent subtraction - is also applied to images, especially taken from the field of mass media. In the work exhibited at the Madre entitled Jacqueline from 1965 (formerly part of the solo exhibition that the artist created in 1974 at the Lia Rumma gallery in Naples), the text completely replaces the image and itself becomes a visual datum, through a game of correspondences between typographic symbols and journalistic language, between visual communication and its suppression. The image of Jacqueline Kennedy bending over her husband who was the victim of the attack (an image that has traveled the world and made history) is restored to a more intimate form of understanding through its own elimination. Both the work on the text and the work on the image must be understood in their mutual interdependence, in the relationship that both establish between verbal and visual communication. In all of Isgrò's work, therefore, we can recognize a criticism conducted against those systems - from the world of information to the material supports of education - within which the transmission of knowledge is closely linked to the creation and maintenance of power.
