LANDSCAPE ECHOES.

Eugenio Castro.

Maurizio Lanzillotta presents us on this occasion with a triple experience of light rooted in a triple experience of landscape, both linked by memory. Hence, the English title of the exhibition Landscapes by heart (the equivalent in Spanish of by heart is "from memory"), claiming literally heart and memory. Thus, landscapes remembered "by heart", "from the memory". Memories of landscapes as living spaces for creation, as lasting impressions on the skin of memory. But we are far beyond a mere plastic transposition. This recreation responds to imagination, discarding prosaic conditionings. Furthermore, how could any such process (mere translation) respond only to memory? Does the representation of what we recall ever coincide with our visual image? ... Born in Campobasso (Molise, Italy), Lanzillota spends his childhood and teen years in Santa Agata (between Módena and Bologna) moving later to Rávena. The low, misty lands of Emilia Romagna will live on for the artist in the images of its streets and fields hidden by the fog. A daily experience for the people of those lands in autumn and winter, a time where one wonders whether the sky has fallen on earth, even if only to show its dark, damp countenance. A vision reflected by Fellini in his tragicomic Amarcord, Lanzillotta reminds me. As in the sequence where the grandfather, after closing the gates of his house asks himself "where am I? I don't think I am anywhere. If this is death, it's not very appealing". Or the next sequence where in a dawning atmosphere that responds to the previous twilight the grandson walks to school and as he crosses a landscape of ghostly trees, visible and invisible in the thick fog, he recognises then, perplexed and confused, the images of the future. But to these childhood experiences, unyielding in spite of constant erosion, we must add those lived by the artist years later in Spain. After settling in this country (again the unknown land, the dazzled expatriate, like when he moved from south to northern Italy) he experiences once again the ascetic elevation of the light and the landscape as he crosses the Castilian plateau. Through his clear gaze, like that of a child -for ever conforming the deepest layers of psychic life- whispering the return of hidden feelings, he senses the extreme light and spaciousness of that stretch of land where scattered ilexes mark the distances and concentrate the void. All these visions and states, kindled by the thick fog and the vast solar radiation, pervade today Lanzillotta's work. In bringing together his thoughts and inspiration, which become apparent in the veil that covers his images and in the light that invades them, he bestows them with a semi-translucent quality which accounts for their potential seduction.

We have now reached that third experience of light suggested at the beginning and that is his way of painting. Nothing but it, both as a symbol and as a craft, can give name to the miracle: to give birth, to make the light, to give birth to mystery (*). As to our artist, he shows all his skill in this double creative and technical process. We must point out the great deal of care he takes over the accomplishment of his goals. His detailed, patient, meticulous work, obsessive to the point of exhaustion, consists in eliminating any disturbing gesture, smoothing out the pictorial matter and polishing the surface itself until he reaches that "early Italian" patina which collects the light and dampness that conform the physical and visual atmosphere imagined. A purifying process which paradoxically does not substract but it adds, as the artist forces himself to superimpose successive and subtle layers of paint until he reaches the ultimate effect. Such process implies a symbolism which supports the underlying memory in his paintings: layers of memories of his future. Such behaviour confirms in turn a strictly pictorial task, diametrically opposed to any postmodern deconstruction operation supposedly implied in the veiling of the image as in his works on human anatomy (fragmented faces and bodies) where "the protecting veil prevents us from touching the skin" (1). In this case the pre-eminent misty atmosphere does not separate us from the landscape. It rather makes us inhabit it, it "pulls" us into it because the veil that covers it is not a protection but the humus of the place which touches our gaze livening it with its sparkling substance and filling it with its damp physique.

Maurizio Lanzillota is proud that his work -and himself too- belong to the "Italian province". But do not misinterpret the term. I am referring to that specific province of creation that has contributed its prestigious creative spirit to the evolution of art, as verified by some of its people: Giotto in tradition; in the first decades of the 20th. century the metaphysical school of Ferrara (especially De Chirico); and of course Giorgio Morandi. But the artist declares that his greatest influence (more intellectual than plastic) would be Mattia Moreni (2) to whom he owes a question that has ever since been the clue to his own freedom of expression: "what is all this prattle about post-modernism when modernity has not yet taken place?" The mysterious echoes of this question inspire Lanzillotta's dealings with art giving impetus to his creation. And in wise answer to the "master", he has chosen not to decipher the mystery but to explore it, letting himself be carried by its fertile flow. As for myself, I have a feeling that it is that call underlies the execution of the impossible on the margins of history with total disdain of cultural or current dictates. And that is where the work shown in this exhibition is outstanding: it announces the metaphysics of the outside by internalizing the account of the landscape as living presence of a time and a space free of any ties to time and culture. Isn't landscape but the incarnation of the unthinkable, furthermore, doesn't it refuse to be worded or illustrated in any way -whether painting, literary, philosophical or any other? That is the point stressed by Maurizio Lancillotta when he imagines his unreal and naturalist, realistic and speculative scenarios which compel us to a an entirely honest, fathomless contemplation, innate perhaps in a promise, if not of happiness, indeed of bewitchment. A scenario, on the other hand, which gives back to the elevated feeling of nature its own specificity: the duality landscape-inside, landscape-outside, which gathers all cumulative experiences of landscape in one single, sacred experience of nature. In this sense, when the artist recovers for his painting the traditional and marked Italian sense of symmetry he introduces a sacred feeling beautifully solved with the ilex which from its location in the painting claims centrality. It is not in vain that a sense of calm and balance fills the scenes where the emblematic tree prevails intensifying the impression of pacified nature common to all of them. A sort of assertion of a state of calmness which invites to the regeneration of man in nature according to an unconditional relationship, quite profitless and maybe only feasible as an encounter. Possibly a virtue impossible to alter even by such a devastating agent as a tornado. In fact, a lengthy contemplation of this group of paintings marked by such element makes it totally clear that there isn't in them any reference to nature unleashed . Looking at them attentively, in detail and as a whole, we do not feel the danger of their destructive action. Furthermore, it is more about inaction more than about action because thanks to artist's skill the violence that goes with that awesome and visually fascinating phenomenon is completely suspended (3). Maurizio Lanzillota does not seem to release the fantasy of extreme turbulence but rather, in choosing a natural phenomenon which brutally expresses its innocence, he conveys his wish to consolidate a realm of bliss. Even more so, I like to think that the impressive, single presence, the ancient tree, determines both the plastic and the mental space and is the fantastic entity which embodies the powerful peculiarity of the place. But whether or not it is so, we are facing the artist's undeniable wish to make relevant the original shock which has not only subdued the original clamour depicted in this series, but has made of such stillness the state and consequence that these works are. This is as much as to say that there is a look ascribed to that quality, possibly because it had always lain there as a gift bestowed by nature that will stay with him for a lifetime. Such is what I like to think, that landscape bestowed upon him this gift during the first twelve years of his life and that Maurizio Lanzillotta shares it with us with the selflessness that befits a gratuitous act. At the same time it is inviting us to remain faithful to its original muteness, alert to the murmur of what took place there, namely, of what is to come.

Notes:

1. María de Fátima Lambert in Fiore del cuore, catlogue of the exhibition of M.Lanzillotta in Maior gallery, Oporto, Portugal 2002.
2. Mattia Moreni ( Pavia 1920 – Brisighella, 1999). The Italian artistic scene has a strong presence both in his prophetic, iconoclastic character and in his work. From 1952 to 1954 he belonged to the Gruppo degli otto group inspired by Lionello Venturi. He is the author of a motif which defines his work, the angurie (images inspired in myth, allegory and drama) and his paintings are basically associated to a strongly expresionist style closely related to the grotesque and visionary images of his contemporary Enrico Baj's nuclearist movement. In this sense his self-portraits, which he commenced in 1983 and are close to l'art informel, are especially meaningful. In them he recovers to a good extent what had been his practice some thirty years earlier, what the artist himself called "il regressivo consapevole",in response contemporary "low profile" painting and as denunciation of a clear decline of human species which he was persuaded of.
3. We can use the painting Viento (Wind) (280 x 100) which links both series. It depicts indeed a field apparently beaten by the wind coming presumably from a tornado. It is a feeling conveyed by the movement of the plants marked by the position of the ilex which the speed and strength of the wind have almost turned into a cypress. By comparison, the sky and the only cloud that dwells in it, remain entirely calm. The tornado itself, its white colour, contribute to contradict with its stillness and brightness all the agitation of the foreground. And between the two fronts, the line of the horizon so clearly defined, so impassive, in the least dissipated, balancing precisely both aspects of nature and combining them in a single one: the stillness that has stilled the conjured passion that seems to occur/happen on the canvas.