© Lorenzo Puglisi 2024
lorenzopuglisi27@yahoo.it
Giovanni Gazzaneo (2019)
Lorenzo Puglisi. Black Horizons and Glimmers of the Infinite
As soon as we have a point of eternity in the soul, we have nothing more to do but to take care of it, for it will grow of itself like a seed.
Simone Weil, L’ombra e la grazia
All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow.
Lev Tolstoj, Anna Karenina
Black is absolute. It is the cradle of origin and the realm of shadow, the horizon between life and death. The height of possibilities and nothingness, where beginning and end coincide. It is in this coincidence that everything happens. Lorenzo Puglisi is fascinated by black. All his work is conceived within this impenetrable color that negates vision and form. Thus the black becomes womb-like, a quiver of light, the dawn of a new beginning. A beginning with its roots steeped in the art of the great masters, from Leonardo and Caravaggio by way of Bacon.
In his work, Puglisi embraces the history of art, not through the perfection of formal completeness, but by offering us an open image, free to play out in the polarity of white and black, a transparent purity and opaque obscurity, in a never ending dynamic. Here black is not simply a horizon, and absolutely not a frame or space waiting to be filled; it is the substance of the work itself. A presence emerges from the shadows, a presence sustained by the black, and which comes alive in this blackness: flickers of light, flakes of thick, vibrant paint, as if in perpetual motion. The myths of the ancient civilizations, the story of Genesis in the Bible and modern scientific discoveries all agree on the fact that our origin is swathed in shadow, just as a pregnant womb safeguards life. Black invokes light. Puglisi’s works always offer a dual perspective: the work itself and the masterpiece from which it is drawn. His art is relation.
This play of presence and absence is the real subject of his work, albeit an elusive one. His essential painting, pared right down to faces and hands, plays out in a vital tension of vision and memory. The oblivion of darkness, the insurmountable wall, and the unveiling of light. Both evocation and custodian, capturing the eye of the artist and of the viewer. What do we basically derive from the masterpieces we love? Only glimmers of light, perhaps. This is what drives his rarified painting, focusing on what remains that is essential, such as a trace, or better still a star, its light traveling towards us from a distant past yet still with the power to show us the way. The sense that art is also the ability to preserve, making history our own so that history can generate new things. Puglisi’s analogy-based language applies to art and applies to life. As the philosopher Douglas Hofstadter said: “Analogy is the mechanism that allows us to use our past to orientate ourselves in the present. We build thousands of robust and flexible categories by using millions of analogies throughout our lives; we retrieve the appropriate categories through swift analogies made in fractions of a second, basing ourselves on imperceptible indices that indicate what does and does not count in a given situation. Thus we survive the world, thus we figure out the world and thus we savor the world.”1
The artist does not offer us a definitive form but a generating of form, which is also the mean- ing of this contemplation of the past. The work is not dead; the work is alive; it is fecund and its splendor shines across the centuries and continues to illumine man and time. A splendor that becomes dazzling in an icon such as Leonardo’s Last Supper. It is to this painting that Puglisi has dedicated Il Grande Sacrificio, his most important work to date. The poet Davide Rondoni had this to say: “Il Grande Sacrificio presents a double challenge, because it dialogues with a masterpiece and, especially, because it is inspired by it, defying every possible obscurity, that of the vanity of sacrifice and the vanity of everything, including art as a whole, to emerge as little more than a mark, little more than a drawing or relief. Almost as if issuing, stuttering from a new, increasingly extreme beginning.”2
Leonardo’s apostles in the Last Supper are portraits of real men, caught in a vortex of emo- tions and thoughts after the unexpected news of the betrayal, which accompanies the greatest miracle, the offering of the love and life of Christ through the consecration of bread and wine. In the auroral vision of the thirteen figures, Puglisi brings back to us faces and hands of light - thus transfigured they form an ideal score or perhaps a constellation. The faces in Il Grande Sacrificio are the final step in the lengthy process from which Puglisi’s art originates. It begins with the series of portraits, which are never captured in the fixity of the moment. There are no outlines on which to focus, no eyes on which to fix one’s gaze, no expression that excludes the others. The faces molded by the light, which is movement, ex- press both what we are to become and the glow of interiority, which is the most intimate part of ourselves, lightness and the power of breath. The art lies in recognizing ourselves. As Puglisi says: “In the Last Supper, the movement of the figures of the apostles and their facial expressions reveal the inner turmoil that human beings constantly experience, in powerful contrast to the central figure of Jesus. Its delicate strength and tranquility leap out like a new apparition, a vibrant triangulation between his hands—one turned downward and the other upward—and the awareness on his face, a trian- gulation that forms a solid figure, firmly grounded on earth while also in contact with heaven. Seeing this extraordinarily powerful image, thick with a mystery that I can only intuit, drove my repeated attempts to depict Il Grande Sacrificio, showing only those parts of the anatomy in which life is most powerfully manifest: the hands and faces, entirely immersed in the darkness of the unknowable. The huge sacrifice that Christ has made through the conscious offering of his life is the great sacrifice proposed to man, allowing him to make Him theirs, even for a few seconds. I have been carrying forward this work for almost five years because the result is never adequate or satisfying.”3
This “repeated attempt” is also true of other great masterpieces in which the sacred event is both subject and manifestation: Puglisi’s works Natività (The Nativity), Matteo e l’angelo (Matthew and the Angel) and La Misericordia (Mercy) all stem from his study of Caravaggio; Crocifissione (The Crucifixion) is inspired by both Velázquez and Rubens. Nell’orto degli ulivi (In the Garden of Olives) is drawn from a small work by Goya. The absolute beauty of the works by which he is “seduced,” as he likes to put it, is channeled back to us rather like an X-ray of light. As Puglisi says: “When I entered the church of Pio Monte in Naples, and saw Caravaggio’s The Seven Works of Mercy, my immediate impression was of a line, there was a sort of S-shaped light - traced between the head of the angel, its hand, the head of the man on the ground, the foot - which is what I then portrayed in the darkness. When we look at a work as a whole we don’t see the individual images, we don’t take in all the details: it’s impossible for the eye and for the human brain. That’s why I try to find a glimpse that I hope will capture the essential of the representation, like a synthesis, a concentration of visual energy.” 4
This perceived image settles over time and is then resurrected by the act of painting: “The act is the really significant moment: in that moment of silence and solitude I perceive a sort of distance between me and the act of painting, and in this act which is free of emotions, both delicate and decisive, the painting happens and a glimmer of light, a micro-particle of life, is captured by that extraordinary possibility that is painting in oils.”5 Vision through memory, painting as event: this is how these maps and scores are born. The spirit both liberates and concentrates - the face, the essence of being, the nucleus of life. Then there is no desire to pick bare or dismember the subject, rather the insatiable desire to delve deep into the work being contemplated, almost to harvest the seeds that have generated it. These original seeds are the light because they are the manifestation of an inexhaustible beauty that emerges from the abysses of the great history of art and demands to be newly incarnated. For this to happen one has to know how to look into the depths, and it requires total immersion in the work.
Like the humble pearl fisher, Puglisi knows how to hold his breath at length, knows how to gather up the fragments of light from the waters of the abysses, immerses himself where no one had dared do so before, where silence is all. Authentic beauty comes with silence. Looking is not enough, one needs to listen to it to grasp it, only in this way can the essential be revealed and perceived by children and mystics, artists and poets. Art is an adventure into the depths of being. A risky adventure, because there can be no ad- venture without risk. The risk of losing oneself, the risk of finding oneself, the risk of abandoning oneself to the totally Other. Puglisi’s work is primarily vision, contemplation, mystery (light, certainly, but always on a shadowy horizon), and silence, rather than re-search. Perhaps this is what informs his predilection for religious subjects, which lend themselves well to the absolute of white and black, revelation and mystery. The relationship between art and the sacred, as Stanislas Fumet suggests, is the origin of art itself, quite apart from any subject: “Whoever says that art imitates nature does not know it.
It imitates creation, the act of creating; it reproduces the movement of the Creator in order to do as he does. It attempts to resemble the Word.”6 The gift of being able to create makes art an imitation not of the created but of the Creator himself, and it is the truest stamp of our being. In Puglisi, it is light itself that is the subject. Light collected and shaped by his extraordinary brushstrokes/flakes of paint. Lunar light, reflected, given and received beyond the darkness, beyond time, beyond the work that seduces and inspires. This light is concentrated in the points that for Puglisi palpitate with life - the face, the hands, less often the feet: nothing else - in a sort of entropy of the history of art. The essentiality of the work is also the essentiality of the colors; the dark background is a variable mixture of black, Van Dyck brown, burnt umber, sometimes red or blue, and it is applied in different layers; the white always contains some red. In some parts of the body traces of the un- derlying support may appear, the yellow of the poplar wood board or the white of the canvas or of the paper. Everything is concentrated, everything points to what is original, everything is played out within the category of what is strictly necessary. This is Kandinsky’s great lesson: “All methods are sacred if they are internally neces- sary. All methods are sins if they are not justified by internal necessity.”7
Puglisi always makes manifest his “debt” to memory, with gratitude. In fact, the essence of his work lies precisely in his original relationship with the masterpiece - which he continues to ex- plore: “In this embrace with the great art of the past my life has taken on a completely different breadth.”8 His approach goes completely against the tide; many of his contemporaries approach history from a mistaken belief that the new can only stem from nothing, a necessary prerequisite for expressing only the inner world of the art- ist. Art is thus created between the extremes of “shout” and “play,” contestation and evasion. A choice that often leads to embracing nonsense and illogicality and turns freedom into arbitrariness. Playing with provocation and with irony, between a howl of despair and violence and the laughter of the jester and the madman, they want to prove that there is nothing worth valuing any more be- cause there’s nothing left to contemplate. Thus the poverty or inaccessibility of their work masks a disheartening inability to “make” or give shape and color to an idea and an emotion. This results in works that deny contemplation but demand communication, through video or photographic documentation of the “creative” process that has spawned them and which supports works that are non-works. As Puglisi says: “All that is simply an idea, all that which needs explanations, all that which can easily be remade by anyone, simply makes no sense to me, it has no value, it is some- thing I don’t believe in. Painting is not a game.”9 In Puglisi creative tension, which underpins freedom of expression, derives from an ability to bring opposite poles together: matter and spirit, tradition and contemporaneity (in an awareness that art is never just for the present), inspiration and craft. Only when the two poles come together can a true work of art be created - a masterpiece that defies the passage of time. Until the conjunction of visible and invisible that Klee described is achieved: “Art does not reproduce the visible but makes visible.” 10 His relationship with the great art of the past is a loving relationship: “The works from which my paintings are conceived are those that have seduced me.”11 True knowledge generates love. Puglisi is in love with beauty. In 2002 the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger wrote: “The beautiful wounds, but this is exactly how it summons man to his final destiny.”12 True knowledge is being struck by the arrow of beau- ty that wounds man: being touched by reality.13
In the language of beauty, truth shines forth (as St. Thomas Aquinas teaches us), a glimpse of the hereafter that triggers amazement, gratitude, and joy. Yes, Puglisi has been wounded by beauty; his works resemble stigmata of masterpieces. Lucio Fontana proposed cuts and holes as openings into the infinite, while Puglisi distils the infinite in his glimmers of light, in his star- like faces. In his poetics, the white “marks” and, less frequently the lines, are unexpected openings, an invitation to venture further into his sidereal universes. The darkness guides the eye towards the light; the essential gives of itself in all its profundity, freely, devoid of restrictions and voluptuousness of form.
Puglisi’s works are a visual manifestation of the concept of aletheia, the truth the Ancient Greeks understood as “disclosure” or “unconcealedness,” achieved by looking below the surface of things, seeing their pure and fragile side, while aspiring to draw out the essential, that luminous quality that appears to those who contemplate them and takes them by surprise. It is the power of seeing that Wim Wenders describes: “I find it extraordinary that, unlike thought, image does not impose an opinion on things. A judgment on an object, a person, a city or a landscape is always implicit in the operation of thought. Seeing, on the other hand, transcends opinions: when we look at a person, an object or the world, we develop an authentic relationship, an attitude disconnected from any sort of judgment, basically we are perceiving on a pure level. I like the word ‘insight’: it suggests that you can reach truth or understanding just by an act of seeing, while by thinking you can lose yourself, or lose touch with the world. For me, seeing is immersing myself in the world, while thinking is distancing myself from it.”14
ENDNOTES:
1 Douglas Richard Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander, Surfaces and Es- sences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking (New York, 2013). Dis- claimer: the original English quotation could not be sourced. This is a translation from the Italian, not the original text.
2 Conversation between Davide Rondoni and Giovanni Gazzaneo, Milan, February 20, 2019.
3 Conversation between Lorenzo Puglisi and Giovanni Gazzaneo, Bologna, January 17, 2019.
4 Ibid. 5 Ibid.
6 Stanislas Fumet, Processo all’arte, a cura di Cecilia De Carli (Milan, 2003). This passage has been translated from the Italian.
7 Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, taken from, https://www.wassily-kandinsky.org/wassily-kandinsky-quotes.jsp, accessed March 20 2019
8 Conversation between Lorenzo Puglisi and Giovanni Gazzaneo, 2019.
9 Ibid.
10 Paul Klee, Confessione creatrice e altri scritti (Milan, 2016 [“Creative Confession,” 1920]). See also John Elderfield, “Old Art Terms #5: Making Visible,” Artsy.net, January 28, 2013, https://www.artsy.net/article/johnel-derfield-old-art-terms-number-5-making-visible, accessed March 16, 2019.
11 Conversation between Lorenzo Puglisi and Giovanni Gazzaneo, 2019.
12 Joseph Ratzinger, "Message to the Communion and Liberation Meeting", Vatican.va, Rimini, August 21, 2002
http://www.vatican.va/roman_ curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20020824_ ratzinger-cl-rimini_en.html, accessed March 16, 2019.
13 Ibid.
14 Wim Wenders, The Act of Seeing (London,1997). Disclaimer: the origi- nal English quotation could not be sourced. The first three sentences are translated from the Italian, not the original text. The last two sentences have been taken from Wim Wenders, Urban Solitude, brochure, Palazzo Incontro (Rome, 2014).