Marco Tonelli "O infigurable light": between painting and transfiguration

Alessandro Beltrami (2019)

Il Grande Sacrificio, or Painting as Revelation

Il Grande Sacrificio (The Great Sacrifice), at six meters wide and two meters high, on exhibit in the Bramante Sacristy at the Dominican convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie, is the largest painting not just in the Last Supper series, but of Lorenzo Puglisi’s entire output. There is a black wall from which a rhythmical and fluctuating series of white marks emerge, which we recognize immediately as the echo of the heads and hands of Christ and the Apostles in Leonardo’s Last Supper, the ghost of which remains clinging to a wall just a few dozen meters away.

Puglisi has devoted several works to Leonard’s masterpiece, each slightly different from the next, like a series of Baroque variations on a bass line. It is a systematic practice in his modus operandi—his canvases draw on Caravaggio in particular, Velázquez and Goya (both artists evoked by Christ Crucified and Christ on the Mount of Olives on exhibit with Il Grande Sacrificio), Correggio, Rubens, and Rembrandt. This is great painting.
There is no need to dwell on the historic element of Puglisi’s work. It is not a matter of reprising ancient iconography according to citationist dynamics, as in a postmodern game. In this sense, perhaps, no image has ever been exploited quite as much as Leonardo’s Last Supper, along with Michelangelo’s Pietà in the Vatican.

Aside from the sphere of visual arts’, cinematography is bursting with examples—from Luis Buñuel’s Viridiana to Robert Altman’s MASH and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice—not to mention their exploitation for advertising purposes and, slightly less, for merchandising (a category to which the novels of Dan Brown and their derivatives basically belong). The innovative religious iconography that Leonardo put together, taking such care to scrutinize the truth of the overwhelming human devastation caused by the religious event, has become a pop icon—stripped bare, or rather picked clean, reduced to a trite blink of the eye, and all too often used au contraire. An effect triggered by the huge increase in devotional popular press and oleographs. Andy Warhol understood this perfectly, and in his reiteration attempted to retrieve its original power, cumulatively at least. In most cases, the current replication of paintings modeled on Leonardo’s Last Supper, which also applies to the field of paintings destined for places of worship or of religious inspiration, involves reproducing the same dynamics, or rather exploiting the fame of the image without rethinking its profound motivations; it also reveals a lack of oversight on the use of sources that are so important and yet are amply metabolized by secularized visual culture; lastly, it shows a lack of imagination and ability to put together an appropriate, contemporary iconographical vocabulary, under the illusion that revarnishing or adding the patina of time to an imaginary product from the past is sufficient. A somewhat equivocal idea of tradition.

In this regard, Puglisi places himself decidedly a latere, because while he does harness the fame of the works, it is for the purposes of developing a new approach, an approach that also has the power to draw rightful and fresh attention to the original. Were Puglisi not working from an image consolidated in our collective memory, it would be difficult to follow him quite in the same way. It is as if Puglisi were not reworking Leonardo’s Last Supper, but its reverberation. 1 Every memory as such is subjected to processes of reconstruction, alteration (his works differ from established models in terms of the position, the number, and the morphology of the elements), the mediation of time, and the sedimentation of momentary experience. It is only as a memory that an experience can become a constituent part—of both a person and of a community. Memories are never complete right down to the last detail or the general setting of the event. They retain just what they perceive as the essential elements, turning forgetting into a selective virtue, exactly as we prune trees so that they bear more fruit or to make them stronger.

Puglisi works towards the complete removal of details. On one hand he uses black to saturate the space, obliterating all possible context and rendering all details superfluous. In a sense, he picks the subject clean of any adjectives, asides, or complementary structure, cutting it right back to the basic premise, subject-verb.

There is a further stripping down of the surviving parts of the other work, sketched with white dashes and veils of white speckled simply with red or yellow—the heads and the other elements that we recognize as anatomical parts are in reality summary paint effects that “detail” nothing or practically nothing of a vault or a limb.

Michelangelo had scant regard for Flemish painting because of the preponderance of detail so typical of devotional painting. For him, according to the words he puts into the mouth of Francisco de Holanda in the Dialogues with Michelangelo or Da pintura antiga, Flemish painting is made “to deceive the eyes,” littered with “rags, ruins, very green fields shaded by trees, rivers and bridges—what they call landscapes—with many figures here and there. That sort of thing is always popular; the least artistic spirit can find something there that appeals to it; it is enough to be inquisitive and to have good eyes.” 2 While the classical element of Italian painting fails to trigger a single tear in the devout, the “everyday” nature of Flemish painting prompts a great many. Michelangelo stresses the danger of spiritual deception—which is therefore very much more pernicious than intellectual deception—from art that thrives on its own capacity to illude, which confuses sentiment and sentimental, truth and appearance, mysticism and self-satisfaction.

Puglisi’s work is not simply an homage or attempt at an “after Leonardo,” especially as there is no attempt to imitate. Every discourse on Leonardo or Caravaggio that draws on these assumptions, or attempts a iconographical or stylistic parallel, is absurd or grotesque—this is borne out by all the mannerist painting that is also, and perhaps especially, all too common in the field of sacred art; painting that is confined to the surface, no matter how greatly imbued with “contemporaneity,” which ends up being a simulation, a mechanical performance with its own share of exhibitionism, devoid of the intimate necessity of a spiritually fertile act of love.

Puglisi’s radical reductionist approach is in itself a synthetic process that does not reveal the formal or volumetric structure of the image, but brings it back to the detail as a nuclear essence. Eliminating every detail until only one remains merely appears to be paradoxical, because it is the process of sorting out what is accidental and what is not. Puglisi basically only “clips” the parts that he believes are truly critical to the image and that constitute its semantic kernel.

Leonardo and Caravaggio operate in the same way. They focus on the expressive elements of an inner truth that fuels the meaning and also include the structural aspect of the painting, whether or not it coincides with the geometrical one. These are points that polarize the image so that everything gravitates around them—once identified they are impossible to escape, the rest of the painting, no matter how sumptuous, is simply peripheral. Leonardo and Caravaggio both strove for the same “nature,” internal not external. Their imitators (ancient and modern) are blocked by the virtuosity of the surfaces, formalizing the invention, turning the figures painted by the two masters into characters and masks. They reduce them to a protocol. What they fail to understand is that neither master set out to paint reality but truth. This is also what Francis Bacon, the artist through whom Puglisi seems to be logging centuries of art history, so different and yet so similar, also strove for.

This is a pitfall that Puglisi manages to avoid. One might call it “psychological interiority,” or “inner nature,” but it is in fact simply the “truth”—recognizing it, acknowledging it, is the disturbing mechanism that frees art from all narrative decorativism and brings it into the realm of the authentically sacred in that it is destabilizing. It is empathetic resonance, a meeting point where “the invisible is not rendered visible”—if anything it is a recognition that what is visible is already so.

Puglisi achieves recognition through the “consumption” of shape/form. “To know oneself,” said Paul Claudel in Art Poétique (Poetic Art), “for this [for the physical body], one needs to be co-born, to propose oneself as a means of co-naissance, it means giving birth to all the objects one knows oneself, with oneself. It means becoming their common sign, the transient image of the moment at which they become capable of mutually supporting this connection. At any moment it is charged with summing up what is not, to achieve this by consuming them.” 3 Here Claudel is reprising an outdated meaning of consommer (although it is employed by St. Bernard), altogether different from consumer, in the merely negative sense of “consumption.” The term derives from the Latin cum-summa, “summing up,” or rather “executing,” “fulfilling,” “completing.” “Consummatum est” Christ said on the cross.

Consommer, according to Émile Littré, the nineteenth-century lexicographer and author of the Dictionnaire de la Langue Française (Dictionary of the French Language), indicates a “useful destruction,” an act carried out by things that absorb others, thence “consuming” in the sense of assuming and digesting, what Aristotle would have described as absorbing external factors. 4 Consuming in order to understand, consuming in order to assimilate. Their reliquial nature ensures that these images themselves spark genesis (those seeds in the dark are the drivers of both the primordial image and the present image) and apocalypse, not because they are the remains of destruction, because this is not destruction, rather the signs and evidence of a revelation. In Puglisi’s paintings, the series of details that glimmer like phosphenes against the blackness is the residue of a blinding flash, a vision that persists on the retina, like a ghost. Every painting is the memory of an experience of glaring blindness.

Black is apocalypse.There is the quest for an apophatic aesthetic, a revealing through silence, common to many contemporary experiences. 5 For some it is the Noche oscura (dark night of the soul) of St. John of the Cross. For others it is the blacks employed by Ad Reinhardt, but not those of Mark Rothko, whose nihilism is not a nada but a todo. The Belgian artist Thierry de Cordier is currently working on a series of works inspired precisely by the Carmelite nada, in which the cross slowly disappears into a vibrant darkness, the “luminous darkness” through which God both conceals and reveals himself. There is also the black of kenosis, as thick as tar, the concept informing William Congdon’s crucifixes, and the black of Giovanni Manfredini’s combusted clouds. Lastly, there is Pierre Soulages’s explorationof the metaphysic of the light inside the black. The density of Puglisi’s blackness undoubtedly has that quality of “luminous darkness,” but it is not self-sustaining; it implies an emptying, yet it is not a body of emptiness. 6 It is a black that necessarily exists in a dialectic.

It has been said that there is a marked difference between Puglisi’s work and seventeenth-century tenebrism, from which in some way, as he says, it is distanced by fascination. 7 However, distinctions also exist between the Baroque painters. Neutral or dark backgrounds although previously attested to, became more common under Caravaggio’s influence. It is a solution that Merisi adopts for bringing everything right into the foreground and excluding the context, so as to concentrate on the event alone. Many of his epigones, or less distinguished followers, were fascinated by darkness in terms of atmosphere, whereas in Caravaggio it is a condition for portraying both the physical and metaphysical reason for light. Caravaggio’s work still holds a narrative value, however, a historical nature of the symbol, which is lacking in Puglisi. His black is a field in which the absolute manifests itself: much more akin, for example, to the blackness of Velázquez’s Crucifixion and Zurbarán’s black. Basically in Puglisi the blackness appears to correspond to the gold used in icons. Just as gold vibrates, is impenetrable, has an almost infinite depth. It is a saturating total that becomes the habitat for the forms, a space that certifies the ontologically apocalyptic nature of the image. The white forms, liminary bodies, inhabit the blackness. Puglisi is clearly referencing Francis Bacon, again, not merely appropriating his language. There is instead an ideal continuity of approach. It is perhaps worth remembering that Bacon continually measured himself against the history of western art, from Velàsquez to Rembrandt—not forgetting Cimabue’s Crucifix. Bacon’s expressionism thus reverberates with the live experience of great painting. In one of his interviews with David Sylvester, Bacon stresses the fact that the only purpose of his “space frames,” as he referred to the spatial grids on which his paintings were organized, was to focus attention on the image: “I cut down the scale of the canvas by drawing in these rectangles which concentrate the image down. Just to see it better.” 8 It is therefore above all a question of relation between space and body, of an attempt to trap the body inside the cage (capturing it to represent it) while he continually eludes it. Puglisi does not employ cages as a device, but his black seems to fulfill the same function, which is to make it easier to see. Paint taking the place of body.

Let us leave aside an existential reading of Bacon and Puglisi, a literary approach to painting, fascinating yet often misleading. When Bacon appears to distort the faces of George Dyer or Isabel Rawsthorne with a sneer, it is because he is chasing the light on their faces, acknowledging the resistance of reality against the tide of time and, equally, the failure of all attempts to stem it. Puglisi registers the resistance of the secret of other people’s painting to his own, the difficulty of capturing the clarity of an intimate intuition in an image. Form, perception, the challenge of restitution—a return to the fundamentals of great painting.

Notes

1 Livio Vacchini, Capolavori (Melfi, 2017), p. 40. (Translated as: “‘Masterpieces,’ writes Livio Vacchini, referring to architecture, although it is a universal discourse, ‘sometimes seem to endure over time for the precise purpose of triggering new interpretations arising from their own contradictions, so that we feel the urge to fill in the ignorance that they remind us envelops our possibilities.’”).

2 Francisco de Holanda, Dialoghi Romani con Michelangelo, ed. E. Spina Barelli (Milan, 1964), pp. 30–31. (Translated as The Project Gutenberg EBook of Michelangelo, by Romain Rolland, accessed March 13, 2019).

3 Cited in Filippo Fimiani, “Poetica Mundi. Estetica e ontologia delle forme in Paul Claudel,” Aesthetica Preprint, no. 63 (2001): 36.

4 Ibid.

5 “Having left behind all appearances, not only those perceived by the senses but also those the intellect seems to see, it plunges ever deeper within itself, until by spiritual effort it penetrates to the invisible and the unknowable, and there it sees God. This is the true knowledge of what is sought. This is the seeing that consists in not seeing.” Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses, 2:162–66, from the Monastic Office of Vigils, http://www.centreforcatholicstudies.co.uk/?page_id=765 (accessed March 14 2019).

6 “Darkness,” according to Valerio Delhò, “is for him a condensation of light, not its absence.” Valerio Dehò, Lorenzo Puglisi 15–18 (Milan, 2018), p. 11.

7 Mark Gisbourne, “Fantasmi nel Vuoto,” in Valerio Dehò, Lorenzo Puglisi 15–18 (Milan, 2018), p. 22.

8 David Sylvester, quoted in Colm Tóibín, Love in a Dark Time: And Other Explorations of Gay Lives and Literature (New York, 2001), p. 160.