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

Marco Meneguzzo (2023)

Lorenzo Puglisi. Giving a Face to the Face

There are essentially two ways to look at Lorenzo Puglisi’s works: one is inspired by nostalgia, the other by continuity. The first one is wrong, the second one right.
The fact that the artist takes his inspiration from classical themes, especially classical compositions (they are not the same thing, mind you...), has the great merit of reconciling those (few) diehards who think that contemporary art is a huge scam – as Salvador Dalí described it – with contemporary artists themselves, as if saying that some of them can rec- ognise the primacy of classicism and try to approach it using up-to-date, modern languages. This attitude, too, which is a derivation of the nostalgic tendency mentioned above, seen within the context of a larger misinterpretation and a stubborn prejudice, shows a glimpse of truth. But let us proceed in the proper order of things.

Nostalgia for something concerns a state of mind that involves us, inasmuch as we no longer experience the present or the future as desirable, and we create for ourselves a brighter and more appealing image of the past, even if it does not correspond to the truth. Indeed, the vague nostalgia for the past tends to erase any negative element and make the “good old days” a place of order, tranquillity and happiness. This happens even – and perhaps all the more so – if we did not actually live in the moment for which we feel nostalgia. (The highly suc- cessful television sitcom of the eighties Happy Days, which was set in the fifties and revolved around the lives of a group of teenagers, attracted an audience that had not experienced that time, and even the nostalgic references to the seventies by many young artists of the present day, no older than forty, are grounded in the desire to return to the strong feelings and ideas that came with political protest, now extinct.) This kind of situation represents a sort of “pro- jection” disguised as nostalgia, even if, on closer inspection, nostalgia is essentially always a projection. For art, things are a little more complicated because the overwhelming nostalgia for an ancient art – in other words, art from before the historical avant-gardes – does not only mean a longing for a representation of a better world, but is also a sharp rejection of contem- poraneity, and above all, suggests a belief in the possibility of a return to those languages and a reaffirmation of the “true” art. It is a return that no other type of nostalgia could foresee, certainly not in literature, perhaps a bit in music, and not at all in architecture. Puglisi’s work, however, seems to uphold this outlook.

The simplest approach to Puglisi’s work consists, in fact, in identifying the model that has inspired it: recognising the pictorial work of the past from which it takes its inspiration is usually the first step, but it is often also the last and only one. Similar works are compared, and the mental reconstruction of the original and its derivatives suffices for our visual tranquillity, as if it were a sort of riddle, which once solved can no longer be proposed again, because we already know the answer. At best, it can be proposed to friends who do not know it, to produce that moment of wonder and surprise – to then move on to something else. But underlying this feeling, even if in many cases it is unconscious (because it is too intricate), is the idea that contemporary art is a deterioration of real art, a sort of senile decay. This is an opinion that Giorgio Vasari would probably have upheld. Moreover, there is also the question of technique, or rather, of technical ability, which we thought we had already overcome once and for all, but it has instead returned on the wave of globalisation, giving new life to those who, finding themselves before one of Lucio Fontana’s slashes, exclaim “I can do this, too!”, utterly con- vinced. It seems impossible, but much of the resistance to the language of contemporary art is still linked to the question of executive talent.

At this point, Puglisi would find himself described as a “follower” not so much of a single master, but of all the “old masters” of the painting tradition, and at the same time, he would become a prominent spokesperson for critics of the new artistic languages and for the avant-garde spirit that pervades our times: an exponent (legitimate, of course) of “reaction” or of the preservation of pictorial traditions that have been living with difficulty under the radar for a century and a half now, but which have numerous staunch silent supporters in the art world. Puglisi thus appears to be a champion of a strong ideological position, a representative of concepts that are at once conservative and antagonistic. This absolute contraposition, however, blinds the gaze and privileges the mind: one can be blind and defend this opinion with valid arguments, even if alien to the actual work, because in this case it is enough to be in the trenches to establish a belonging, to take sides. But Puglisi is certainly not this, if you know about the lucid attention he has paid to his life as an artist, as well as about the absolute distance that separates him from any ideological stance.

Furthermore, about the nostalgia that functions as the basso continuo of viewing, it would be best to check whether it is the nostalgia of the beholder or of the maker. These are two very different states of mind: the nostalgia of the observer could in fact be deliber- ately induced by the artist (the Happy Days effect...) through an intellectual act supported by the technique, for the calculated purpose of obtaining a sentimental appreciation from a well-identified audience, a coldly calculated move decided beforehand. It is quite another thing if it is the artist who feels nostalgia for a certain type of art and gives it expression in his works, thus arousing the empathy of the public, in a sort of shared feeling that ranges from the longing for the past to attempting to repropose it with updated styles. This approach is certainly “truer” than the first one discussed, from a human point of view, but not necessarily from a linguistic one: it is possible to achieve the effect of emotional involvement without being particularly emotionally invested – think, for example, of the various schools of theatre acting that maintain that it is not necessary to have cried to make the public cry – as long as you know the rhetorical devices for triggering crying or laughter, taken in this case as an example for the entire range of possible emotions. But, again, and more importantly, is this Puglisi’s situation?

Some might say that feeling nostalgic for a period or a style and trying to reproduce them while updating them is not very different from the idea of stylistic continuity, which we placed at opposite ends of the spectrum at the beginning of this piece, and of course, admiration of great painting does not lie outside of Puglisi’s reasons for being an artist. But, once again, we must distinguish between admiration and nostalgia. Nearly all contemporary artists feel admiration for the great masters of the past, but hardly any of them feel nostalgia for them, and it is easy to understand because nostalgia is an unproductive and fundamentally solip- sistic attitude (think of the difference between Leslie Howard/Ashley Wilkes and Clark Gable/ Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind...), that has little to do with the need to produce and the egotism typical of artists. Instead, since, as Yves Klein said, “all art is contemporary”, we can and must investigate the sense of continuity that Puglisi clearly points out to us as the main focus of his activity. Here, continuity does not at all mean pretending that nothing happened in the twentieth century, that the avant-gardes, the cinema, Duchamp, the possibility that any object could be a work of art, conceptualism, the dematerialisation of the work, etc. none of this took place. Indeed, it means verifying that “despite” the fact that all this happened, cer- tain strands were never broken and that painting – not just the ancient sort – still occupies its place in the contemporary world, even after the iconoclastic fury of the neo-avantgardes of the sixties and seventies. Thus, this continuity is a condition that can look to the future, once the flood has subsided, and can even take on cultural globalisation (there are some similarities with the work of the Franco-Chinese artist Yan Pei Ming, for example, in the use of a range of greys to paint faces...). Puglisi looks to the promise of what is to come, and not to the past as a refuge; and only when his public, too, stops playing at revival or flaunting their own erudition, can we begin to truly see his works.

So why does he himself seem to be looking in this direction? He seems to be but is not. No artist has a critical purpose when creating a work and it is unlikely – with rare exceptions, headed up by Duchamp – for him to consider his creation a simple tool for demonstrating a thesis. Puglisi is no different. Of course, for him the past is a rich source of ideas not for replicating themes and subjects, but rather as a “repertoire” of postures. Centuries and cen- turies of painting, even as styles came and went, have, so to speak, “distilled” a repertoire of gestures, movements, faces, poses that belong to humans more than to the period in which they were painted. Thus, by eliminating from the composition everything that is contingent, that is, everything that is linked to the modes of representation typical of a period, as well as to its objects, what remains is the representation of what does not change, the human being remains, stripped of all historical attributes (paradoxically, exactly what we are looking for when we want to know which painting inspired this or that one of Puglisi’s works ...). Hence, as a corollary, it seems obvious that the artist’s inspiration comes from the great masters rather than the minor ones: thanks to their greatness, these artists have overstepped their own his- torical moment and have captured the “timeless” human, the one who now represents and will represent in the future, the essence of humanity. To put it bluntly, they served to Puglisi on a silver platter what he otherwise would have had to distil on his own, perhaps with an analytical work – commendable for an art historian, essentially useless for an artist – on a plethora of minor artists, who in their turn had already taken their inspiration from the great ones. Better just to go straight to the source, then.

The rest will follow (so to speak). And in any case, this is the continuity that rises above the styles and trends, and that interests Puglisi: if there is a way to portray humans that transcends time, it is right to make use of it, and at least from a statistical point of view, it cannot be said that figure painting has not been able to bear the weight of the centuries. Thus, it is not a question of denying the worth of other modes of expression from an ideological point of view, but simply of taking what is best suited to oneself and one’s own language (elements that overlap often, but not always). Among other things, Puglisi’s post-ideological approach – which comes to him naturally, without the macerations of self-criticism and justification – is perfectly coherent, and contemporaneous, with what is going on in the rest of the globalised art world, where painting needs no self-justification, where citation is an element like many others, devoid of negative connotations – just think of the concept of the meme on the web! – and very widespread. In this way, Puglisi has found a portion of his work already done, and he realised that those positions of the faces and hand – the choice is limited to these elements, and it is enough – could also be our own, and those of the future, despite that tiny residue of rhetoric that every representation of something carries with it. This last aspect – a sort of portrait rhetoric, perceptible even in the absence of well-defined faces and identifiable gestures – completely belongs to the language of painting, and cannot and must not be eliminated, because it makes up the code of repre- sentation, which coalesces the thing and its image in a familiar or in any case understandable way. Puglisi, instead of reducing the rhetorical scope of the representation, exalts it, eliminating everything around it, and in so doing tests it, verifying its strength and endurance with respect to the composition on the canvas and the depth of the gaze. It is probably also for this reason that the observer, deep down, is afraid of venturing out into the open sea, and tries to do ev- erything to remain anchored to what is familiar, to the work “underlying” the painting and the certainty of the old master, rather than wondering what this painting really is about.

To do this, there are two different approaches, this time both valid: the sophisticated approach and the naïve approach. The first starts with what you known, the second with what you see. Taken together, the two positions should offer a balanced result, neither too weight- ed towards culture nor too inclined to sentiment. Even to an amateur eye, the composition immediately suggests the coordinates of the classical portrait, thanks to the position of the hands, which are also the only element that are actually recognisable as such: we would not recognise the traditional structure of the work if the hands were not recognisable. To tell the truth, we would not even think of anything figurative if it were not for those five fingers. The face exists not for itself, but thanks to the hands next to or below it: only after recognising the hands do we seek to “give a face to the face”, simply because we understand that it really is a face and not a gesture, or a stroke of paint, a mark. In this, we can also see Puglisi’s exec- utive skill, how with a very limited palette – essentially black, white, and red – he manages to construct the features of a face taking shape, one that could be the face of anyone, indeed, of each one of us: all it takes is a vertical stroke of the palette knife on a horizontal ground, and here is a nose; a rippling of the paint in a circular movement, and here is an eye; a smudged red mark, a mouth... all it takes is an instant, and it seems impossible, because once the paint has been put on the canvas, what is there is there forever – but it is not so, because it is our gaze that is changeable, and you only have to move in closer for the figure-effect to vanish, replaced by disintegration, the return to the impasto and formlessness: you need to find a ‘human” distance to see what is human, if you shift closer or farther, you cannot grasp – or indeed see – the theme. Here, this physical problem becomes a metaphor for a conceptual problem: the points of view are not infinite but only one, and the tolerance of perception and understanding is not infinite, but pre-determined, and even if this could appear as a blow to the pluralism of interpretations, it is better to consider it a precise critical request not so much by the artist, but by painting, actually. And this is the conceptual point that most binds Puglisi to tradition.
And then, the black.

In writing this piece, I promised myself that I would keep my references to artists of the past to a minimum, and I have almost succeeded. Almost, because in speaking about the use of black it is impossible not to include an overview of what that black represented in certain ar- tistic periods dear to Puglisi. Well then, the seventeenth-century “Tenebrism”, the black depths of Rembrandt, Caravaggio, and all the others who have been rightly mentioned in this regard (among them, Leonardo, to whom Puglisi paid homage with a great work of his own based on the Last Supper, and then Titian, and Bacon, and Freud...), or all the suggestions that the black conjures up, starting with the alchemical “Nigredo”. All just right, all sharp, all fitting, all coherent. But this is also “another” black that, taking for granted the exact and indisputable art historical references, makes it worthwhile for us to get rid of this cultural superstructure – as far as possible – and assume the role of the naïve observer. Only in this way, in fact, can we try to get beyond the heavy curtain of historical references that risks distracting us from the real focus of our examination, which is Puglisi’s painting, today.

The innocent question is whether the figures are “swallowed up” by the black or do they “emerge” from it? It is a question that should be asked of the observer, because it would re- veal something about their state of mind, their character, which is not a secondary thing when talking about art that cathartically brings out identification with the work: to be swallowed up by the black means being cancelled, it means the future impossibility of seeing, while emerging from the black is a rediscovery, it is the promise of seeing more. One attitude ispessimistic and the other optimistic, to broadly define the sensations of being submerged in or emerging from the black, which, however, Puglisi intentionally leaves to the gaze of others. He, the artist, uses the black as a temporary boundary layer, as what at that instant separates the inside from the outside, as the moment of the apparition, of the epiphany. It is that instant before everything sinks into the blackness, or it emerges dripping wet from the painting. This would not happen with any other colour, because black, before becoming a colour – even for the most intellectual of art historians – it is the darkness, and all abysses are dark, and even if the canvas is bounded by its perimeter, and the room where it hangs is already filled with light, the surface that we can actually touch opens to a depth that blinds us, because it is immeasurable. Everything is fixed, immobile on the canvas, but at the same time it is also extremely mobile, because the face is not defined and the black it is submerged in is immense, that is, immeasurable. Here then is the whole of the indistinct face, which can assume any expression, not having one at all if not a vague suggestion – sad, lost in thought, absorbed, brooding ... – alongside the need mentioned earlier for a perceptive distance from the painting that can be lost by moving just a few dozen centimetres closer to or further from the surface, together with the very “liquid” feel of the composition in the blackness, prone to disappear, appear, anyway change, makes the work mobile and mutable. The human – which, let us not forget, is the true subject of Puglisi’s work – is no longer “posing”.

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