[…] And the painter could not live, nor could work, if they not connect with that mysterious legacy of the memory that captures flashes of light in the pitch black of individual and historical conscience, and brings to light fragments of a submerged world, along with self-knowledge, as Puglisi himself declares rather emotionally.
…Painting, in short, to know (and honour) one’s roots, painting to know oneself, remaining balanced upon a thin wire that links the present to the past and that at the same time separates them. The fracture between past and present is there, it is inevitably there, but the artist, certain artists, make a great effort to stitch it together again, and in the end they manage to do so with surprising results.
In cases such as these it immediately becomes clear that the materials used to paint are not only instrumental for the realization of the works; they are also a part of the artists’ personal poetics, serving as the expressions of their individual aesthetic perception.
For Puglisi, the works of the past are manifested as material clumps floating atop the black background; they bestow a particular corporeality on the things he evokes, images as evanescent as they are dense, that draw a consistent presence from their sudden appearance like recognizable shapes steeped in the light that tears through the darkness.
The contradictions that we see in Puglisi, between the evocation from the darkness of fragments at once evanescent and full, and the evident material dimension of the execution (in his studio, pigments and brushes arranged in the manner of involuntary and thought-provoking still lifes preside over the ambiguous materialization of memories), is resolved in an evocative apparition, negating a structured narrative in his works.
Puglisi’s spectral evocation seems to find his roots with difficulty during a journey that guided him all the way to Rembrandt van Rijn. The artist does not hide the fact that for him the endless repetition of certain forms (or certain visions) is the indispensable condition of the experimentation of what is new.
At this point we might recall an artist, this time from the twentieth century, who as a young man began studying Rembrandt, and who never ceased to experiment with the mystery of art through themes reiterated in ever changing ways, if it weren’t for the fact that Giorgio Morandi (the artist in question) chose to be a painter in whom the light, even in dialectical opposition to the chiaroscuro modulations, for instance of his prints, always prevailed. […]
© Lorenzo Puglisi 2024
lorenzopuglisi27@yahoo.it
Eike Schmidt - Marzia Faietti (2021)
Puglisi and the with the comparison Ancient Masters