Revenant of/in painting.

Giulio Guberti

Draw near, move away: that is the movement, the double movement. In simple but radical terms, we could say that Maurizio Lanzillotta’s painting shows the invisible origin of visibility, the slow and ghostly coming to light1 of a magma of (mental?) shapes born somewhere other than sight or, if you wish, than the eyes. Still in simple terms. It is a painting not guided by an ochre drawing, a “blind” painting which uses remoteness, the memory of something which attains a structure, even if frail, only when watched from a distance. Like the eyes of the farsighted. A painting not based on drawing (we are not questioning Maurizio’s skill as a draftsman, we are only emphasizing the autonomy of painting with respect even to drawing, and vice versa) and, as the French say, without cloisonne, is quite beyond the theoretical-practical system of margins, impossible to fit in rational frames or closed corpus of any sort. Under no circumstances would I declare that his latest painting is informale2 (historically abstraction has adopted certain forms which cannot be ignored), but I could swear that his origin is indeed so –as is shown in this exhibition- and not only that, but -most important of all- even his latest more “representational” works show that trait. Even before the famous triad sign-matter-gesture, informalism (which, as has been rightly stated more than once, is not in-formal -lacking forms-) has to do with a procedure which is not formal, not subject to pre-established rules. And without a drawing (edges, margins, ochre, cloisonne, etc.) there is obviously no pre-determination. It is clear that, in its original sense, informalism has nothing to do with the tedious dispute iconic-not iconic, abstraction-representational, etc., it belongs to a different conceptual logic, ontologically it is previous to the icon which it includes and exceeds.

Maurizio has become an artist in an atmosphere of a dying avant-garde. The death of history, the death of philosophy, the death of art … the death of God and the death of man. Nietzsche, Heidegger, nihilism, being and nothingness, etc. When his first pictorial impulse sprung (don’t forget that, even then, painting was a passatista3 choice: it is not necessary for the artist to be strictly consistent) it was still under the sign of removing and reducing, so typical of the avant-garde. A contradiction perhaps? Failure to adjust, at most. With the end of avant-gardes contradictions don’t explode any more, the time for revolutions is also over. Remove not only things, but the images of things: behold a nihilist sign. Informalism also smashes the geometrical figure: what little form was left in cloisonne with Kandinsky still enclosed in well defined margins. With Rothko America is wiped off, as the artist himself said. From there, and by reducing, it was easy to reach monochrome (Klein, Schifano in Italy, etc.) or minimalism too. At this point Maurizio faced his first dilemma: leave the picture, even painting perhaps, or remain distilling colours, sublimating brushstrokes like one of Borge’s characters. Don’t be misled: art fairs are full of works of artists who have made this last choice. Actually, painting doesn’t need anything from anybody, it is self-sufficient. Painting as significant and as significance. In Italy it was called “nuova pittura”, or “pittura-pittura”. Perhaps in Spain it never revived because it had never been totally interrupted. And yet for Maurizio art is not only an aesthetic choice, but an ethical one. And that is how the tendency to remove is exhausted and the task of adding slowly starts. First as a decorative trend, then iconic: bodies, landscapes. But his is not a return of the Same, but a return of the Different, as in eastern religions in which Maurizio has always been deeply interested, more as an expert than as a follower. It is not a return to order such as took place in Europe in the ‘20s and which also influenced Picasso –briefly- and the more or less orthodox Italian novencentisti like Carrá, Sironi and De Chirico, much as they came from futurist and/or metaphysical experiences. What separates the after from the before is on the one hand Auschwitz and on the other the end of all certainty, the absolute ruling of doubt. Modernity has been an era of traumas. Consider the copernican trauma: the trauma of the loss of humanist centralism; the darwinian trauma where man is just another animal, only more “evolved” than others; and finally the trauma of psychoanalysis and the discovery of the unconscious: “the Self no longer rules his home” (Freud). How could one possibly be like before? And now the demands of technology: all the nuclear, genetic, virtual issues, the “noise” of media, etc.

Draw near, move away. It was about that double movement that has always “moved” painting. The apocalyptic statements of our fathers (of the fathers who founded our culture) have turned out to be true and false at the same time. That is the “scandal” of the time we live in, the postnovecento3. Lessing’s distinction between arts of time and arts of space is also true and false. This double movement which controls the reading of a book takes place, obviously, in time. And that has always been the basis in the appreciation of painting. Maurizio has taken that movement as the departing, decisive point of his work, an even muscular work, which by symmetry forces the observer too to undergo the same process (draw near/move away), essential for the appreciation of the work. When drawing near, the picture is not iconic, it is “pittura-pittura”, (almost) monochrome. When moving away, it reveals a rather strange icon, perhaps (even) disturbing. Maurizio’s painting captures not only the thick mist and the vast solar radiation4, I believe, but above all the “spirit” of landscape (like previously, that of faces and bodies). But a spirit is “breath”, the word actually comes from the Latin spirare, blow, breathe, but also expire, die. And spirit also means spectre (ghost, apparition, vision). Ghosts are actually called spirits. Or, as the French say, revenant, he who returns. Derrida writes: a spirit “is also a revenant because it starts by returning. After expiring, it returns”. These landscapes (like the faces and the bodies before) return to painting, to the staging of painting, apparently similar to those before the avant-gardes but, as Shakespeare would have it, made of a different “substance”. We shall never grasp the cultural scope of Maurizio’s painting unless we understand that it is the staging of a ghostly “return” (and let us hope it isn’t also a prophecy of what is to happen), a revenant, to make visible what is invisible (let us hope however that it is also a resurrection –that it doesn’t leave things as before). The positive side of the ghost is the task of mourning, which is the prototype of all tasks (Freud). Furthermore, it cries out for justice like Amleto’s father. Finally, popular wisdom is also aware that there are great spirits that represent our heritage. The after and before are revealed by the double movement (conceptual, but also performative), by the double bind of approaching and stepping back.

And then, the fact that his art is (or has become) profoundly European in spite of its ambiguous origins, that it is far from marketing and consumption –unlike American pop- seems to me a remarkable virtue. My wish is that it that it may remain “intimate”, even if it has to face more difficult commitments, avoiding intimism. For such is the danger of an art like this, luckily avoided until today. Maurizio’s inner balance is shaped by his formative balance, that is to say, that it gives form. Aesthetic, but ethical too.

1. In Italian, venire alla luce, lit. come to light, be born, appear.
2 The Italian term informale has been kept instead of the more generic term ‘abstract’
3 Referring to the past, that looks to the past.
4 Eugenio Castro. Resonancias del Paisaje (Echoes of the Landscape), catalogue of M.L’s exhibition, Galería 57, Madrid. 2003.