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Eliel David Pérez Martínez Huir del destino Eng

Eliel David Pérez Martínez
Huir del destino

Wizard Gallery, Milan (I)
May — June 2023

Sleeping with coyotes
Daniele Capra




Huir del destino (“escaping fate”) brings together a dozen works on canvas and of an installation nature by Eliel David Pérez Martínez, which stem from a reflection on all those who are forced to flee the context in which they have lived in search of freedom, work or a decent living condition. Women and men on the run, in a manner similar to a prey that, under the eyes of the hunter, desperately tries to escape a fate that appears marked. However, it is precisely in the desperate attempt, in the precipitous rush, in fleeing while closing their eyes to everything they leave behind – aware of the immeasurable risk – that their only possible space of freedom lies. People dreaming of escaping from violence or poverty, and the hunted animal unknowingly share the same fate and vital courage. And they sleep, tired, under the same sky.


Fate is perceived as the inexorable predetermination of what happens. It is the inevitable, a preordained sequence of events beyond the capacities of man to will or do. One cannot escape it except through crazy risk or desperate and improbable attempt. Only in this way can one try to act to try to deviate or delay the succession of events, throwing grains of sand between the gears that move in connection. We can only cause a temporary slowdown of the course of events, a momentary failure, and try to take advantage of it. In its course, fate is uncontrollable, and our margins of action are very limited; yet they exist, and it is up to us to seize them. As Arthur Schopenhauer stated, “Fate shuffles the cards, but we play”. It comforts us to believe that fortune favours the bold, even though we know it is not always the case.


Huir del destino (“escaping fate”) tells of the many experiences, sometimes heard firsthand by the artist, of people from Central America who try to cross the Mexican desert to immigrate illegally to the United States, relying on simply walking and the operational support of experienced guides who know their way around that impassable environment. These men who help the illegal immigrants are habitually called coyotes because, exactly like such an animal, they must be phenomenal walkers capable of withstanding the most extreme situations, deadly heat, hunger, thirst and fatigue. The coyote-which also plays an important role in the Mesoamerican mythologies dear to the artist-is thus a metaphor for the ferryman who leads to a better future and an emblem of those who never give themselves up for defeat, managing to escape, thanks to their strength of will and their own ability to endure, from a story that is at first glance already written.


The works in the Durmiendo con coyotes (“sleeping with coyotes”) series originate as a narrative, minimal and dry, built on the abandoned objects of migrants crossing the desert. They are simple garbage, plastic bottles, blankets and forgotten clothing, traces of a presence and a quick passage that Pérez Martínez outlines with an essential language, with liquid, intense colours and a sparse but vivid figuration. In his canvases elements of Mexican folk tradition, geometric patterns, bad painting and narrative rigour mix freely, in a sunny, Latin cocktail, at times almost lysergic. From time to time coyotes, birds, a fox appear on the canvas, silent witnesses to the path of the many illegal immigrants fleeing their condition and, at the same time, symbols of a life that, despite a thousand endless adversities, never stops continuing.


The practice of the Mexican artist is based on the use of the medium of painting and fabric, which are employed both in two-dimensional form and in sculptural mode. Her works are characterized by bright colours and vibrant backgrounds, frequently animated by fluid forms and geometric patterns. In Pérez Martínez’s works, portions of painted canvas, fabric cut-outs, and rags alternate freely, producing a particular blend in which patterns, aniconic geometries, and figures are juxtaposed. The subjects depicted are often defined by essential outlines, with many details left to the observer’s imagination. The figuration appears liquid and anti-descriptive, allusive, but at the same time elusive.


Pérez Martínez’s research is poetically motivated by a sociopolitical investigation, an aspect that is never too openly exhibited or declared in his works. The recurring themes of his research have to do with his own personal experience, the cultural experiences of Mexico, and social criticism, originating from the analysis of cultural, anthropological and economic factors.

Diango Hernández. Olaismo Eng

Diango Hernández
Olaismo

FL Wizard Gallery, Milan (I)
March ― May 2022

A spray of salt water
Daniele Capra




The artistic practice of Diango Hernández, born from design and the analysis of the cultural and political context, has progressively been directed towards the primary elements of space, shape and color. Central to his poetics is the use of composition and visual rhythm originated by sign and color, which reveal an imagery charged with autobiographical elements. Even in the case of works in which formal aspects assume a fundamental role, the direct experiences lived by the artist or their memory are the main generative elements, without ever being in any way directly traceable or influencing the artist in an autobiographical way. Hernández became artist since he is a person who has experienced life and his works are the elements of a complex narrative of identity: in it, in fact, conceptual, socio-political and more distinctly visual aspects are poetically recomposed, through a synthetic form endowed with an impalpable magical aura. This aspect allows us to grasp the numerous articulations of the author’s research, which range with extreme freedom from sculpture to drawing, from installation to painting, but with great technical precision with respect to the chosen medium and its expressive implications.


The paintings of the Waterfalls series are the result of a first-hand experience of the artist, who, in a completely random way, finds himself observing an image through the old glass door of his house in Düsseldorf. Hernández is enraptured by that vision and by the both unfaithful and reliable deformed transcription the corrugated glass allows. He realizes how such simple artifice can be an instrument of wonder that can provide a magically altered version of reality. He begins to look at other images through the glass and decides to make those unexpected apparitions into works. So he begins to paint what he sees, mimetically transferring on the canvas, thanks to oil colors, those deformed visions. The resulting compositions are both allusive and elusive: in part they show the subject, making it understandable and manifest, in part they hide it not allowing to know it thoroughly. It is a sort of speaking with silence, made possible by the fiction of that simple semi-transparent glass that becomes, in Hernández’s logic, not so much a simple filter that stands between us and the world, but a real instrument of mise-en-scène of reality, completely autonomous. The artist’s aim is not so much to use a lens to obtain results that evoke other languages, as happened in pictorialism in which the photograph had to simulate painting, but rather to use corrugated glass as an unprecedented camera obscura, albeit anomalous and unfaithful, capable of selecting a slice of reality and making it surprisingly available to our gaze, thanks to its subsequent pictorial transcription. In other words, the process implemented by the artist does not aim to directly shape the result, making it pleasant or seductive, but to increase the intensity and poignancy of the original source. Hernández, in essence, does not focus on the final outcome, but acts retroactively by intensifying the force of the original content, in some way enhancing it.


In the same way, however, the deformation produced takes the form of the wave, a conceptual element on which the artist has been working for some time and with renewed approaches. The wave is at the same time subject, logotype and interpretative instrument through which to observe the world. It is a real point of observation, completely self-subsistent, which guarantees a unique and, in some ways, totalizing perspective. But it is also an iconographic matrix, a general/abstract concept and a sentimental approach, a reductio ad unum and a measure of the visible. The wave, in Spanish “ola”, is the fundamental element with a vaguely modernist flavor, but in an open and vital key, with imaginative Caribbean freedom. It is a sample to the possible surreal reconstruction of each image that painting makes possible, in total independence from reality and its most rigid limitations. Hernández deconstructs the perceived form to recompose it as an imagined form, with subtle lightness and lucid madness.


Classical painting and the subjects codified by the genres (in particular the portrait, the architectural view of the interior and the vase of flowers) are the primary subjects of his works, even if there is no emphasis on the mimetic representation of reality, that is, in wanting to resemble it in some way. In fact, the artist takes the programmatic freedom to digress, not to choose the shortest path, but to move in the surroundings, dilating the path with different strategies. It is a dynamic that leads to a perceptive slowing down of the spectator, who finds himself in a condition similar to the one who is looking at a text that continuously oscillates, as unstable as the continuous flow of the waves. In fact, Hernández transforms every observer into Italo Calvino’s Mr. Palomar (in the first story of the book of the same name), intent on catching the ripples of the sea and their perpetual variations, since “each wave is different from another wave, even if not immediately adjacent or successive; in other words, there are some forms and sequences that are repeated, though irregularly distributed in space and time.” The eyes dance in an attempt to capture the fixity of an instant, only to fail and start the game all over again. It is a challenge in which painting is tickled by the possible intertwining of lines and, in some respects, the language of graphics. In this questioning dance triggered by the Cuban artist, the viewer is involved in a wild dance that lasts well into the night. It is a continuous struggle between the detail and the overall view, between wanting to recognize and having to imagine that detail that has been eluded by the painting, since in front of Hernández’s work we are naturally led, like Mr. Palomar, to “to perceive all its simultaneous components without overlooking any of them.” His painting is thus a kaleidoscope that triggers the mystery of painting, in a game of revelations, presences, crazy chases and silent apparitions. Like the Cuban sea, which in winter in Havana bumps into the wall of the Malecón, shattering into a spray of salt water that covers the entire city with an impalpable veil that perfumes the air.

I is another

Chiara Calore, Greta Ferretti
I is another

D3082, Venice
March ― June 2021

Je est une autre
Daniele Capra


In the famous Lettre du voyant, that he wrote to Paul Demeny when he was only 16 years old, Arthur Rimbaud theorised how a poet must know that he must inquire into him- or herself, beyond any boundaries. The first task of a person who wants to become a poet, he wrote, “is to study his own awareness of himself, in its entirety; he seeks out his soul, he inspects it, he tests it, he learns it. As soon as he knows it, he must cultivate it!”. It is in fact necessary “to make the soul into a monster”, by indulging each of its temptations without bothering too much about moral limits: in order to go beyond the shallows of ordinariness, it is necessary to become a seer “through a long, boundless, and systematized disorganization of all the senses. All forms of love, of suffering, of madness”. In this feverish inquiry, the poet, according to Rimbaud, also takes on a civic role in his face-to-face with mankind because he is, first of all, “truly the thief of fire. He is responsible for humanity, for animals even; he will have to make sure his visions can be smelled, fondled, listened to; if what he brings back from beyond has form, he gives it form; if it has none, he gives it none”. [1]
Such a process inevitably assumes a method, unknowingly in part, and no longer based on the retracing of emotions in the placid and seraphic calm of emotional detachment, [2] but in a kind of double movement: centripetal/introspective at the beginning, and then centrifugal/extroverted. If the former has the maieutic function of self-analysis, the latter has the aim of projecting one’s own persona beyond the boundary of one’s identity, in the search for any unexpected possibility. It is in the search for that limit, in the attempt to fly in order to search for the abyss, that Rimbaud finds the ultimate sense of poetry, of its fleeting, inexpressible, and crude authenticity. A truth that is lived at first hand by the poet, in the awareness that, lastly, “I is another”.[3]


Io è un’altra traces and is a witness to that same intense wish for awareness and unlimited urgency to explore felt by Rimbaud, in the works by Chiara Calore and Greta Ferretti, whose art is fed by a continuous imaginative need to test otherness, thanks to a plural individual identity that acts without any kind of hindrance through projection, amplification or deflagration (the title of the show is the feminine declination of the phrase “Je est un autre” by the French poet). These young artists undertake, in fact, a painting characterised by an articulated, destabilising, and anarchic figuration, in which realistic elements are ably mixed with the unexpected. What is extraneous, deformed or monstrous is materialised on the painting surface in an interrogative form. Both the composition and anatomy of the subject represented are upset by unexpected metamorphoses and transformations in which are freely combined images from mythology, the bizarre, and Gothic novels, as well as a fervid imagination. The unexpected change of stylistic register and the juxtaposition of narratively improbable (and physically impossible) situations are the recurring ways that the artists undertake in order to spark off the short-circuit between the different visual elements present on the scene, which from time to time are loaded with sense, mystery, irreverent irony, or psychically dense unease. The viewer is held in check by the impossibility of leading the image back to an intelligible logic, contrarily to what the figuration apparently suggests. In fact what is clear in their works, for those who force themselves to understand, is a false clue, a mistaken path that leads to a cul-de-sac. The narration – as much in the more rhythmic/broken up works by Calore as in the more lyrical/thoughtful ones by Ferretti – introduces, that is, an unexpected evolution, some event able to alter the diegetic flow: something else is about to happen, what we had not thought of. In this way their works are devised as diabolic sentries to lead the viewer into a somewhere else to be imagined, interrogating it and pushing it to keep attention high. And we seem to hear, at a distance, the mocking laughter of David Lynch.


The painting by Chiara Calore is characterised by the continuous superimposition of figurative elements juxtaposed on the canvas in an ironic, disturbing and visionary form. Her works are characterised by a lysergic atmosphere, one in which animal and human subjects, personal projections, self-portraits, and allusions to works from art history are combined in a surreal and caustic manner. A bizarre and unlikely mass of men, dogs, horses, cats, peacocks, and freaks agitate in an anarchic way the canvases in a forest of allusions. It is a painting that, as Amerigo Nutolo writes, “tends to the abstraction of the subjects, to impetuous narratives, centred on the movements of escape, synthesis, tensions within the relationship with the surface”, [4] obliging the viewer to struggle continuously between a vision of the whole and a reading of the details, between the main story and the narrative micro-episodes. In this way there takes on a form an uninhibited dance, primitive and overwhelming, where the subjects fluctuate on the canvas. Clumsy phantasms, seductive and without redemption, immersed in an orgy of colour.


The work by Greta Ferretti is shot through with a strong narrative tension and an intense psychoanalytical load. Her works on canvas and paper recount curious stories, paradoxical or absurd facts, all experienced by the protagonists in an apparently unaware form, immersed in a surreal and Kafka-like atmosphere. In her paintings the human subjects seem to search for a possible relationship with the context and with the animate and inanimate objects which surround them. However, they seem the unexplainable causes and victims of absurd, eccentric, or embarrassing situations, in which undesirable effects are about to manifest themselves under the viewers’ eyes. The sense of suspension is reinforced by a careful composition, by a dry and restrained style dominated by liquid and evanescent colours (often made with the use of watercolours or ink), and by the alternation between details with a representative function and elements of a context cancelled by the artist. Evidently aware of the power of silence, Ferretti highlights unpredictable contradictions in terms of human behaviour, and the emotive upheaval originated in the continuous recombination of reality, emptiness, and dream-like projection.




[1] A. Rimbaud, Opere, trad. I. Margoni, Feltrinelli, Milano, 1964, p. 141-142.
[2] Cfr. W. Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads: «I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity».
[3] Op. cit., p. 143.
[3] A. Nutolo, Opera viva, exhibition cat., Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, Venice, 2019, p. 12.

Jacob Patrick Brooks. Panic Room Eng

Jacob Patrick Brooks
Panic Room

A.MORE gallery, Milan (I)
January ― March 2021

Everyday stories
Daniele Capra




Jacob Patrick Brooks’ painting features simple, ironic, caustic and wild figuration. His subjects are outlined by decided, caricatural traits that recall those of cartoons, and an anti-naturalistic colour, in which violent, impetuous brush-strokes, full of matter, are relentlessly overlaid. The subjects are clearly and firmly defined in his compositions, with irregular areas of colour driven to the greatest contrast, in which the human element is never missing. Warm and cold hues, as conflicting or distant colours are juxtaposed without any regard, in an irritating, brutal way. There are no shades, half tones, spaces for slowing or relaxation, as the colour is spread on the surface with such rhythm, impetuosity and incessancy that the observer is overwhelmed. This style, impassioned yet ironic, renders the small everyday events narrated by the American artist so surprising and interest-worthy. Spontaneously, yet unexpectedly, Brooks is able to surprise the observer but also associate them with the subject presented, bringing them closer and making them feel part of a story that unfolds as they watch.


Brooks’ artistic practice shows how both personal life and the daily occurring events, from the most negligible to the most emotionally intense, are an infinite source of stimuli to draw on for the creation of a work. The artist is, first and foremost, an author who has lived, who, that is, has used his first-hand experiences and stories, even if complicated and extreme, in his work. In other words, Brooks is an observer of the reality in front of him; neither alongside nor around him but exactly in front. He is always present in everything that chance has befall in front of his eyes; he is a spectator of the life and stories that continually happen. Paradoxically, we could say that he is a serial hoarder of micro-narrations and images that he archives and then uses and manipulates in the construction of other stories. Although, in his case, there is no precise correspondence between his affairs and the stories he paints, the baggage of his past is a powerful and fertile seed, from the narrative and psychological point of view. Thus, it may happen that our life unexpectedly overlaps with his, in the visual transposition of a story into that apparent fiction of the work. His painting is like a tailor-made suit that is not made from fabric, but from the most diverse pieces of his and our lives.


The expressive strenght in his work is measured and skilfully orchestrated as already experienced and psychoanalytically metabolised. Thus, the artist is concentrated on the reworking, on the drafting of a bare and raw story on the canvas, which is, however, an outcome of real life – not only as a subject but first and foremost as an emotional or psychic experience. His painting, in which, as already mentioned, first-hand stimuli are central, is a work of visual re-elaboration and stitching of experiences in an image. Situations alternate on the surface – those experienced with friends, and unusual or strange scenes observed directly in the community life of the poorer areas of cities, where people use their wits to find jobs, to eat or pass time. Thus, a small impromptu street concert, an afternoon of sun in the garden or an improvised cyclist delivering a bag can be seen one after the other in his canvases. But you are also drawn into passing an evening with friends, making it part of a scene in which a hand suddenly strokes a thigh in a probable invitation to completely unexpected pleasure.


Brooks’ painting is always full of narrative tension, vivid, grouchy and first-hand – it’s incisive and cutting like a Raymond Carver story, in which the reader accidentally ends up identifying with the first person narrator and sees the world like them. The composition is fundamental and intuitive. The narration is minimal, succinct and anti-rhetorical, permeated by sharp, spontaneous humour. The visual elements surrounding the human figure given by the artist, for example a can of beer, a tray, a container full of water or a bag filled with something, could lead a subversion of the action. An observer of the work often feels that something is about to happen. It’s difficult to imagine what, as the potential energy is felt but not where and how it will emerge. It almost seems cinematographic, where the items scattered on the scene are the elements that could trigger a change or, as in a Jim Jarmusch film, create the sweet melancholy of daily life. Thus through his syncopated rhythm Brooks highlights urban life with all its realistic, poetic and perhaps subtly political facets. And shows us a humanity that only lives for the moment, apparently without expectations but at the same time not despairing that, sooner or later, a change may happen.

Filip Markiewicz. Road to Nowhere Eng

Filip Markiewicz
Road to Nowhere

Canepaneri, Milan (I)
December 2020 ― February 2021

Towards an unknown place
Daniele Capra




Sceptical eclecticism
Filip Markiewicz’s freedom of expression is surprising. His work seems to contradict the maxim that says “for a scholar’s strength consists in concentrating all doubt on to his special subject”.[1] The artist suffers from a sort of expressive bulimia which concerns not only the great productivity but also the choice of media used and the disciplines. Thus, his work in drawing, painting, sculpture, video, performance, theatre (as in the recent case of Antigone) or music can be seen close together in time. In other words, there are no limits or exclusions as his natural eclecticism allows him to feel at ease in any situation and any direction he moves in, all the more because, as he argued in one of our conversations, it’s essential “not to have a personal line but to wonder about the most appropriate choices to make on the chosen objective”.
Road to Nowhere gathers the artist’s recent works, ranging from painting to design and video, where topics and styles are dizzily mixed. The title, borrowed from one of the most famous Talking Heads songs, alludes ironically to the inconclusive situation of our present, which contradictorily features realism and fiction, uncertainty and predictability, and meanness and altruism. However, in this situation, the completely human desire to move, even towards an unknown destination, comes out, in search of an island to be totally imagined, that still doesn’t exist but it’s comforting to think that it does, that’s a little utopia, simple, unpretentious, and necessary to continue moving towards something.
In addition, it’s the anarchic, and perhaps post-postmodern, attempt to oppose an established, premeditated fate since, as the chorus says in the introduction to the song, “We know where we’re goin’ / But we don’t know where we’ve been”. Thus, with great irony, Markiewicz seems to oppose Lenin’s philosophical but static question “What’s to be done?” with a kinetic invitation to abandon the immobility of one’s position to move towards something, as David Byrne does incessantly in jest in the video of Road to Nowhere. Naturally, a doubt arises that having a direction to take or an aim to follow is pure illusion, a projection of our imagination or just expectations. What if all this was just make-believe, and the place we’re going to didn’t exist? Although we’ll never know, we should certainly take account of it, even more so if we’re with an eclectic, sceptical artist who, in his career, has created a work in neon displaying the words “Fake better”.


Counter-narrations
Markiewicz’s artistic practice features a sophisticated approach where sociological investigation, media analysis, disillusion and subtle political criticism alternate with a detached, bitter flavour. Mainstream symbols, pop culture iconography, hyperbolic irony, melancholic nostalgia and lucid realism follow each other unceasingly in his works, and the artist moves fluidly through them with an omnivorous approach. Versatility, of topic and style, is often condensed into shows where the spaces become well-structured visual devices, in which the visitor can have an experience with many emotional implications as surprises, confirmations and conflicting feelings. In particular, his work overall has an innate theatrical dimension which draws attention to the visual elements (the observer is always a spectator) and the skilful dose of the emotional component – all this ensures the chance of having an immersive, totalising experience. In addition, it’s important to note how Markiewicz is always invisibly on stage, although not always at the centre of the scene, like an actor who’s also director of the play being staged and who knows every psychological detail of the characters.
In detail, Markiewicz’s painting and his drawings are inhabited by figures that determine our fates – politically, economically, ideologically and through media. The politicians who lead the most important states, leading bankers and the CEOs of large multinational companies are players in a farce in which the artist separates their public image from the personal, institutional, political, economic or artistic credibility. Think, for example, of the oil on canvas Gerhard Nicholson, in whose title the artist blends the surname of the actor in the portrait (Jack Nicholson) with that of the artist whose technique he borrowed (Gerhard Richter). Similarly, logos briefly describing the pervasiveness of corporations and large institutions, the heroes of video games and the actors of the series are recognised in a burlesque/tragic continuum in which Markiewicz highlights the predictable and boring uniformity of the hegemonic imagination. Everything looks the same and can produce in us desire and repulsion, excitement and depression at the same time, since it is unable to scratch the surface and ontologically meaningless and worthless.
The artist reacts inevitably to the uncertainty and ambiguity of the present, in which the experience of an artwork perhaps seems one of the few escape routes or one of the few solid footholds which allow us not to remain involved. Furthermore, although we often pretend that we’re not aware of it, the contradictions, tragedies or madness we’re submerged in are a deadly quagmire that prevents us from moving freely. In Markiewicz’s practise the work itself makes visible the ambiguity and error it’s easy to fall into, and at the same time it provides an intimate and natural counter-narration about the most recurring or predictable opinion. In other words, the work assumes the psycho-analytically liberating functions of irony, criticism and ultimately the political function of dissent.


The unexpected
Our recent history, and more acutely the dramatic situation of the pandemic, has highlighted in an especially significant way how perception of events and their interactions is regulated, particularly, between two opposing and complementary types of events – what we consider “expected”, i.e. taken into account, and those that are “unexpected”, i.e. not announced. We almost perceive the former as unimportant, because it is expected, since it corresponds to established or hoped-for hypotheses. On the other hand, the latter, whose prediction is neither controllable nor planned, becomes very important because of its ability to challenge the ordinary nature of all that was previously imagined. We could say hyperbolically that only the unexpected event really happens, by virtue of its rebellion against the logic of ordinary nature – contrary to what is predictable, banal and taken for granted. And it’s because of its ability to back out of the conventional flow of our hypotheses that an unexpected event is considered as significant and inevitable bearer of meaning. The explosive energy, positive or negative, it triggers is so immense, immeasurable, that it questions our behaviour and the ways we act (individually or collectively) in the reality.
We may think about this when we observe Markiewicz’s works. Encountering one of his works is often the same as having a totally unexpected, previously unimaginable, meeting. Similar to an unexpected event, it is something that sound different and of which we are aware, not because it generates some type of instantaneous surprise, but because its reflective or iconic capacity lasts beyond the time limits of the simple contemplation of the work. Its importance clearly lies in the mental sedimentation of its content, whether this is intimate, political, aesthetical or critical. And when we got the meaning, whether silent like the boy dancing (Tanz der Stille), distorted like the body of the puppet (Dr Mario’s Dream) or reflective like the lucid words of Lech Wałęsa (Wałęsa), it doesn’t stop buzzing in our head. Just like the rhythmical song in which David Byrne walks obsessively towards a place unknown both to himself and to us.


[1] E. Canetti, Auto-da-Fé, transl. by C. V. Wedgwood, London: Pan Books, 1978, p. 60.

Giulio Malinverni. Lo sguardo di Giano Eng

Giulio Malinverni
The gaze of Janus

Marignana Arte, Venice (I)
May ― August 2020

Lo sguardo di Giano
Daniele Capra



“The future winters in the past, meaning there exists an unredeemed past whose promises, not yet fulfilled, continue to press on the future: this is why we only desire what we have already known and project ourselves onto the future developing expectations of the past.” [1]



Janus, apparently, is a whim of Nature. An alienating instance of a deity affected by diprosopus, a congenital malformation the doubles the frontal part of the face of those unfortunate ones afflicted with it. It is a freak, a forbidden, uncanny blow the Roman pantheon [2] deals on our urge for clarity, over which we never cease wracking our brains (despite the countless hypotheses expounded by Latin authors and modern scholars). Janus has two faces and that is why he is the deity called upon to watch over crossroads and city gates: he can see in the two opposite directions. He controls whoever goes out, controls whoever comes in, sees where you are coming from and knows where you are going. Actually “Janus is the janitor who opens and closes the doors (januae) of the annual cycle with the keys which are one of his principle attributes. […] His two faces, according to the common interpretation, represent respectively the past and the future.” [3].
Janus gathers in himself opposite sections and serves as an apparatus able to connect two antithetical perspectives and two incompatible temporal articulations which otherwise would never be able to achieve a unity. That is, he joins these parts and keeps them united in a kind of elastic membrane, that mediates between the space before our eyes and the one behind our backs, between past and future. This explains why often in ancient representations the two faces are not identical: on one side the face is that of an old man (thus rich with the experience of the past) and on the other that of a youth (with a considerable future to encounter). This aspect makes the deity even more seductive, as it shows thereby a dual self that simultaneously lives two ages, two times that we perceive as separate and incompatible.


Janus, with his double and divided gaze that stretches over two horizons and contains two temporal extensions, is the mythological figure that best expresses the wide-ranging nature of Giulio Malinverni’s research. His artistic practice, in its strictly pictorial nature, is wonderfully fecund thanks to his special skill in blending genres, subjects, and iconographic situations that belong to art history with a genuinely contemporary approach and curiosity. Actually his work mingles the figurative universes of 15th and 16th century works and deals with architectures, landscape, and the portrait with a sensitivity to the subject of our day, iconographically combining contradictory and surreal elements drawn from medieval illuminated codices, events sedimented in the collective memory, stories borrowed from internet and social networks, but from his own personal archive of images as well. The recombination of subjects, the lack of hierarchy among the elements of the image, the presence of realistic details often assembled in an ironic way, and even non-sense, render of his work a postmodern narrative in which the sources of reference are openly stated and macrostructures made intelligible. This way Malinverni proves how there can be a painting intimately and conceptually nurtured by painting, that is, able to (re)generate itself by parthenogenesis, without an apparent outside contribution. Yet at the same time he demonstrates how tradition itself – iconographically as well as technically – can be a fictional subject of the narrative, if suitably (re)elaborated or (re)manipulated with respect to present-day narratives. And we may assume that “one of the functions of fiction, combined with history, is to retrospectively liberate certain possibilities of the historic past that did not happen […]. The almost-past of fiction thereby becomes the detector of the hidden possibilities of the actual past.” [4]. Thus, like Janus Bifrons, his painting embraces the firm, coalesced soil of the models of the past and the hazy state of the present, shrouded in the mists of the attempt, the verification, the fiction that releases every possible ulterior narrative lying unachieved.


Actually, the artist’s research is characterized by an innate plurality that we can grasp in the mental intentions and technical data (use of oil, tempera, watercolor on surfaces as canvas, velvet, wood and marble), as well as in the various iconographic modalities (figuration, geometrization, decoration, silhouette, etc.) and the symbolic use of figured elements, animals, and atmospheric phenomena. Recurrent subjects in the artist’s work are architecture, landscape, and the human figure (or the portrait), often used in a symbolic and interrogative form. The author mixes and recombines them, putting them in a close relationship in such a way that each of them is endowed with a counterpart in another section of the image. So Malinverni stages an ongoing dialogue between the constitutive parts of the work, that are bound by a stylistic, conceptual nexus or occasionally a hidden meaning, just as what we observe, as of the 16th century, in works that arose in particular philosophic-literary circles. So his works should be interpreted within a relation of reciprocity and crossed references. In Oasi (“Oasis”) for instance, the portico of a neatly arranged proto-Renaissance palace, with its perfectly orthogonal walls, announces the regular geometry of the landscape it is set in, but is similarly influenced by it in the warm colors and atmosphere. Likewise in Mcleod a bare-chested 19th century pugilist’s body, in a defiant pose, induces a landscape with a storm-threatening sky, its flashes in turn echoed chromatically in the man’s socks.
The same thing occurs in the portraits as well, where the subject’s face and pose set up a visual or psychological relationship with the landscape. This is the case, for instance, of PP or of Il carcerato (“The prisoner”), respectively Paolo Pretolani and Francesco Cima, two a few years older fellow students and artists. In the first picture Malinverni uses the pose in profile of the Double portrait of the Dukes of Urbino by Piero della Francesca and, on the right and the left of the profile, like in Piero’s masterpiece, he paints two segments of the landscape that have a connection with the person portrayed, in this case two views of Umbrian cities that are Pretolani’s places of birth and love. Instead, in the second case, Cima’s face is partially cut horizontally out of the image: in a rigid central perspective the frowning face is gloomily reflected in the metal profiles enclosing it, beneath a vault that pierces the sky on a sunny day.
The landscape, just like the architecture, is the outcome of a psychological or relational projection of something that is present somewhere else in the image. Actually, Malinverni’s pictorial compositions tend to treat each figurative element as something that is conceptually beyond its own (apparent) range to radiate further and thereby negotiate its own role, its own intimate function. That is, the work’s content becomes manifest through a network of references, a projecting superabundance of meaning that it is up to the viewer to grasp and interpret. So the viewer is called upon to pay less attention to the individual parts and how they occupy the surface, than to the constant correspondences occurring between them. And this continuous play of shifting – albeit within the composure of a strict classical, at times metaphysical, composition – challenges the viewer, who is at the mercy of something unforeseen. Barring the presences of phantasmal figures that emerge from time to time (even in the shape of clouds, fluttering curtains, rays or waves), the artist’s works are characterized by an uneasy stillness that presages however something obscure or abrupt about to appear, like a sudden bolt of lightning in the calm that precedes a storm whose clouds have yet to gather.


In Malinverni’s works the dramatic dimension goes with the ironic one, that are inevitably, although with different accents, the sides of the same coin. Someone who enjoys peering into the most unquiet and inextricable corners of the human soul, often desires to show with irony the wildest, burlesque, or trivial ones. This for instance is what happens in Cagaschei (“Shitting Coins”), a giant or perhaps a deity crouching on the top of a mountain, is defecating huge gold coins, those the mediaeval Christian tradition would have called “stercus diaboli”. Malinverni shows the expulsive act and makes the viewer a voyeur attentive to observe a repellent act, but to which each of us, in different ways and forms, is attracted: yet in the artist’s canvas there is neither judgement nor moralizing lesson, but the play of showing the limit between repulsion and desire, between what we want to see and what we would prefer to ignore.
In art history there is no lack of episodes of persons defecating but, as for instance in famous examples by Bosch or Brueghel the Elder, they are placed marginally or merged in the midst of articulated compositions with many figures onstage. Instead in that work, as well in the panel Pioggia tonificante (“Tonic Rain”; the work represents red marble buttocks onto which clouds are unloading a heavy downpour, probable allusion to the myth of Danae, or more subtly the erotic practice of golden shower) the artist ironically shows, albeit partly concealing it, what is considered obscene, indecorous, not worth being looked at. In Malinverni’s work there is frequently a further level of truth, [5] behind what we see. He is shrewd and an authentic cochon, but only for those who have an eye and the irony to grasp it. He is, as Horace would have said, a true artist “of Epicurus’ herd”. [6]




[1] R. Bodei, Paradossi del tempo e della memoria, keynote speech at University of Trento, published in UniTN n. 111, Trento 2009.
[2] Janus is a Latin deity who has no equivalent in the religious cult of the ancient Greeks or the other populations of the Mediterranean basin.
[3] R. Guénon, ‘The Solstitial Symbolism of Janus’, in Symbols of Sacred Science, Hillsdale: Sophia Perennis, 2004, p. 235.
[4] P. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol. 3 (Narrated Time), Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988, p. 227.
[5] How can we fail to think of Venus and Cupid by Lorenzo Lotto (now held at the Metropolitan Museum), with the latter who, in an allusion to fertility, urinates straight into the wreathe Venus is holding?
[6] In a famous letter to his friend Albius Tibullus, Horace describes himself as devoted to the pleasures of life, like “a true hog of Epicure’s herd” (Epistulae, Book 1, 4).

Jingge Dong. The Goddess of the Luo River Eng

Jingge Dong
The Goddess of the Luo River

Azimut, Bologna (I)
January 2020

English text not available

Michele Parisi, Quaderni ADAC Eng

Michele Parisi

essay, Quaderni ADAC
MART Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto (I)
December 2019
ISBN 978-88-95133-53-9

Painting as salvation
Daniele Capra




Practice and repetition
Michele Parisi’s work irrefutably shows how, in art, practice through doing can lead to theory. This process was established by Bernd and Hilla Becher, who, after spending years photographing industrial architecture and houses in the Ruhr using standardisation criteria, understood that these images were not taken on their own, but instead, as elements of a higher degree of taxonomy.[1] Similarly, Parisi – who has practiced photography since his adolescence both for personal research and as a collaborator in photo labs – has developed a form of research that comes from reiteration, expertise, and from being able to manage every stage of the process. Parisi controls every aspect but also forgets that he is able to do so, in order not simply to become a virtuoso, but to allow himself to look beyond technical aspects to construct a shrewd, linear and personal thought structure.
His research – which also undergoes a strongly pictorial stage – is a sort of practice, or in other words, a process that comes from repeating gestures, times, viewpoints and compositions. You can guess that his investigations – which are often centred, even conceptually, on drawing – come from repeating actions until the content manifests itself, when a subject or a detail is revealed as necessary, inescapable. It is an unveiling of sorts, an apparition, a manifestation of something that was not there before, but which needs to be fixed in place, before it gets lost in the blur.


Searching for the subject
Parisi’s research develops in various forms, beginning with a tireless desire to get to know, describe, and rewrite reality in the way it is presented to us. His operational method involves looking at phenomena, recording them with a specific technical device, putting them in order and then recomposing them in a personal, pictorial form that is in part a sort of mimesis inspired by ancient art, despite differing from its assumed faithful correspondence with the source. For Parisi, nature, landscapes, the human body and, more generally, reality are not unparalleled models to be shown servile dedication, but rather, they are sources of visual stimuli that can be selected as part of a continued experience as an observer. They are viewpoints from which to embark on a journey that includes a process of assimilation, development and individual modelling.
Parisi’s aptitude for finding images is, in anthropological terms, similar to that of the gatherer, i.e. the human who, on his or her wanderings as a homo videns, is naturally lead to what is visually important, without having to follow or hunt for it. There is no anxiety or adrenaline, but rather the necessary calm required to collect a piece of reality, to assess its significance and then decide whether or not to use it in a wider preparatory process. Indeed, coding pictorial types is not secondary in Parisi’s work of selecting and sampling what can be seen. Particularly, categories of landscapes, portraits, and still life – which are at times so mixed together they become difficult to distinguish – persist as minimal interpretative grids in relation to the subject. The subsequent process of manipulation through painting leads us to focus on the idea that interest in a subject is not about its iconographic value tout court, but rather its potential for manipulation and transformation. For Parisi, a subject must provide the necessary freedom to deviate from its original content, so that the artist can appropriate its identity and the creative process can produce further personal narration. Painting in particular provides the pivotal tool required to develop the potential elements of the images and divert from the expectations they convey.
Thus, it is fair to say that by dodging the representative orthodoxy of photography, Parisi is free to depart from it, generating a sense and meaning that could not have existed before. Conceptually, the change of direction regarding the source-image occurs in many ways, similar to what happens in Epicurean physics, thanks to the clinamen. In fact, “For were it not their wont thuswise to swerve, down would they [atoms] fall, each one, like drops of rain, through the unbottomed void; and then collisions ne’er could be nor blows among the primal elements; and thus nature would never have created aught”. [2]. It is this swerve away from the vertical (thanks to the intervention of painting) that allows the atoms (i.e. original images) to create elements (works) that did not exist before.
Only a change of direction, therefore, allows the artist to reach his intended destination, which provides a new meaning that was previously absent.


Samplings, casts and presentations
Parisi’s technique requires the instrumental presence of several media, each of which is employed in a different manner and for different reasons. His work is amphibious, since it exists on the border between photography and painting – both of which are equally present in his finished pieces. The artist’s creative process consists of layering two processes, which occur in a ordered sequence. Making use of a pinhole or camera, Paris starts by taking black and white photographs of the subject and printing them onto a canvas specially treated with light-sensitive gel in a darkroom. The artist then works on the image using graphite, charcoal and primarily oil paints, changing or altering the details, light and colour range. By doing so, both a photographic and painted record co-exist: the first is taken from the stream of time and the second acts as a sediment that reflects its lingering extinction (a sort of res derelicta).
Parisi’s methods are not so different from Susan Sontag’s idea of photography as a snapshot of the generic passed time, which is transformed into a documentation, thanks to the way in which it is recorded. These snapshots essentially become elements of an archive, and as Sontag writes, “inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy”. [3] Otherwise, how might we explain the artist’s need to fantasise, placing paint over a photographic image and swerving away from its basic documentary value? We should take a step back, however, to look at the moment captured by the artist in photographic form, with a method that uses light. He uses photosensitive backing to trap an imprint, a trace that preserves the mark of a garden, a landscape or entwined hands. More specifically, it is a cast (i.e., a negative), since it requires a further process to transfer it onto another material that will make it positive again, i.e., able to correspond exactly to its initial form. What Parisi creates through photographs is an additional, complimentary slice of reality, which, once reversed and transferred, returns to us the original. However, aware of its intrinsic limits, Parisi knows that he needs to work around this, reprocess it, and subject it to further manipulation.
His works thus becomes the result of writing over writing – the former in photographic form, the latter pictorial – in a process that circumvents both the idea of mimesis and the supposed originality of the work as an output of the background. As astutely suggested by Parisi in a recent conversation, “my finished pieces are not so much a representation of something, as a presentation of it”. Evidently, this idea involves going beyond the more traditional applications of art in order to turn pieces into self-sufficient devices or entities that exist entirely in their own right, independent and sovereign over their function, without too many parental links to what came before them. In this process, Parisi seems to behave like the man who, in the myth of Plato’s Cave, [4] is able to free himself from his chains and to understand the ruse that holds him prisoner. In Plato’s allegory, the man is able to realise the illusory nature of the shadows on the cave walls and, after becoming used to the light, decides to get to know reality directly. Similarly, Parisi chooses to look beyond the traces that reality leaves on the canvas, in order to capture an idea (eidos) via an individual gesture of strong will. The artist prefers a direct, profound and cognitive experience to simply recording light as it cuts through shadow, reaching to touch something real.


Rewriting and slowing down
Tracing oil paints over a completed image that does not need any substantial additions, in order to change it, rebalance the tones, hide or add details, and actively transform it into something else, is equivalent to geometrically projecting the image outside its own perimeter of significance, looking for a new potential meaning. This is a conceptual operation, due to the conflicting stages of loss and rediscovery that the rewriting process entails. It is also an ideological one, due to a manual process that draws on slowness as one of its key elements. Parisi is in fact interested in remoulding the narration underlying the image in a personal (and in many ways, timeless) way and at the same time, to slow down the flow of events, taking them back to a metaphysical dimension. The subjects of the images remain at a standstill, gradually slowed by the application of paint and coloured layers, thus becoming set and dense, like an object – an inanimate thing that rests in silence.
Rewriting a text (or editing an image) is equivalent to discussing and renegotiating its characteristic elements with regard to perception, ideology, style, grammar, time, idiosyncrasies and the artist’s passions. It is an act of regeneration that, as Carmelo Bene once said about his manipulation of theatrical texts, “turns off an annoying, flickering light bulb to finally switch on the light”. [5] But Parisi’s work is not in opposition to any prior status regarding visual content (as ingeniously but ambiguously occurs with Bene), it is instead a necessary evolution into a final form, a metamorphosis that leads to a change of state. It is a morphological leap, a means of progressing into another dimension, in which any detail – moving out of the typical hic et nunc photographic dimension – becomes part of a broader narrative. In this transition, there is a conceptual leap from the typically precise, specific dimension of recording a snapshot, to a timeless form, such as that used in narration, poetry or the religion. Parisi achieves this by using a pictorial process that reshapes the image from a physical and emotional viewpoint, transforming its details with a desire to slow down our gaze.
The eye gradually comes to rest on what is not there, on a misty garden at an 18th-century villa, on the sun bathing a tree-lined city street, or on shadows that play, like sleepy cats, on archaeological ruins. They become drained, metaphysical images, prepped for our contemplation, thanks to their distance from the speed and unceasing flow of our existences. By opposing this speed, they offer our eyes margins of relaxation and peace, of slowed breathing; like icons of orthodox tradition, they encourage abandonment of everyday life, using images to transport us elsewhere.


Discomfort
What interests Parisi in his work is seeking stasis, i.e., something still and monumental (not so much in the sense of greatness or majesty as in the sense of memory) that acts a doorway to other spaces and places, [6] to a time that perhaps does not even exist. The artist is aiming to alienate the viewer, to ask him or her kind but inconvenient questions that will remain unanswered, because he has no clear ideas to put forward. Or perhaps because, in the contemplative melancholy that the fixed gaze induces, there is no point in finding answers – if such things exist. It is better to lose oneself, to take a step back, and enjoy the image. Sweet, seductive discomfort that gifts the viewer such beauty.




[1] In a conversation I had with Hilla Becher in 2009, on the occasion of her exhibition at the Museo Morandi in Bologna, she told me how, contrary to popular belief, the conceptual photography created by her and her husband originated in an inductive rather than deductive form, since it was the process of repetition that created the theory and not vice versa.
[2] W.E. Leonard (ed.), De Rerum Natura: The Latin Text of Lucretius, Latin and English Edition, University of Wisconsin Press; 2008.
[3] S. Sontag, On Photography, RosettaBooks, LLC, New York 2005, p. 26.
[4] The myth is told by Plato in book VII of The Republic.
[5] C. Bene in E. Ghezzi, Cose mai dette. Fuori orario di fuori orario (librorale), Bompiani, Milano 1996, p. 161: “Turns off an annoying, flickering light bulb to finally switch on the light” [translation by Eurotrad, Urbino].
[6] See the first chapter of V. Stoichita, The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern Metapainting, Cambridge University Press, 1997. The Romanian academic argues that a painting is a doorway, a glimpse into the architecture of the walls that leads to new lives, visions inside the domestic environment of the home.