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

Marco Tonelli (2024)

"O infigurable light": between painting and transfiguration

Neither abstract nor figurative, Lorenzo Puglisi's painting extracts the faces and hands, or rather the face and gesture of works mostly on sacred subjects (Last Supper, Crucifixion, Annunciation, Pieta) from paintings by Great Masters of the past, reducing everything to extreme values of light and darkness. Faces disfigured, erased, no longer identities, soaked in white matter and shining on curtains of deep and dark night, devoid of stars. Epiphanies congealed and immersed in an absent time, gestures eternally frozen, without life or death, nor beginning or end, in a dimension of time and space that is undoubtedly unique in contemporary Italian painting.

Puglisi seems to relive a fundamental moment in the history of painting and images in general, that of transfiguration, that is, the passage of the painting from its moment of representation to that of appearance. The miracle of great ancient painting (which serves as the thematic background to his works) is not so much in telling stories or imitating the visible, but in recreating it with artificial methods and techniques specific only to painting.
Seeing great Renaissance or Baroque painting for example, as well as understanding it, does not only mean understanding its iconography, recognizing the allegorical figures or symbols (precisely the stories), but participating in the mystery of painting, that is, an artificial and constructed gesture that transcends this which he painted to show his own mystery: matter that becomes light, light that becomes darkness.

Puglisi's painting therefore welcomes within itself the mystery of painting itself as if it were its own privileged subject, because painting without a subject is nothing more than imitation or decoration. Even abstract painters like Mark Rothko or Barnett Newman (the great heroes of American abstract expressionism) could not conceive of a painting that did not have a subject, even if it was formless and completely monochrome. Whether it was the tragic sense of life or the heroic and sublime, mystical and transcendent one, it matters little: a painting must possess a content.

Leonardo, Titian, Caravaggio, De Ribera, Goya are some of the original sources from which faces and hands, liquid and ectoplasmic, emerge from Puglisi's dark backgrounds. Initiatory painting in some ways, because the reference to those great artists of the past may not be clear to everyone, not even to the most experts, such is the form of reduction and transfiguration of the originals. Puglisi opens a door into a sort of beyond of painting, on his canvases the physicality of the support is swallowed up in darkness, the black background opens up to a depth that denies perspective vision to offer an anti-naturalistic and metaphysical one. It is too superficial in his case to talk about the night of painting or the absence of light if we do not give these words a different collocation, which puts them back in a perspective of remoteness and distance, because such is his current anachronism in reviving ancient painting through transfigured gestures and faces.

To literally shed light on this oxymoron (can an anachronism be current?), I would like to try to cross, albeit in a very synthetic way, two difficult literary sources, also out of date but precisely for this reason disruptive, capable of projecting thoughts and images in a elsewhere which is that of poetic inspiration itself in the moment of its maximum anticipation, visionaryness and mystical projection, starting from the two fundamental values of Puglisi's painting or, to use terms now to be redefined, "darkness" and "light".
Jacopone da Todi (1230?-1306), first a lawman and then a poet, a leading representative of the community of so-called "spiritual" minor friars, is known above all for a series of extraordinary Laudi written in a popular and dialectal Italian language with Umbrian influences , who outlined a true negative theology. Not because it is nihilistic but because it is a practicable way to reach God through renunciation and reduction to a minimum of the stimuli coming from worldly life.

What interests us in Jacopone's poetry is the conception of light and darkness and of a mode of spiritual elevation through earthly reduction (could we define Puglisi's painting as negative in this sense?). In Laude LXIX dedicated to Faith, Hope and Charity, explaining the process of spiritual elevation of the soul towards God, a path symbolized by three trees, Jacopone wrote: "I was then elevated to the fourth branch and my intellect was darkened... in the sixth branch I lost sleep and saw the world darkened... I was admitted to the seventh branch and was given a double light." 1

The path towards the light therefore passes through a dark sleep. In Laude LXXXI Jacopone also stated that "the sun is not true light, but light of matter", 2 still making it clear that there is a light other than the physical, supernatural one, which is ultimately that of divine Grace, as can be seen admirably from the following verses taken from Laude XC: “O indescribable light, who can represent you, who wanted to dwell in the dark darkness?
Your light does not guide those who believe they see you and can define what you are: at night I see that it is day, the faculty cannot be found, nor can anyone who sees that splendor give proof of you." 3 To end in the same poem with the expression "you are divine light, purified from darkness". 4
In these verses (translated into Italian for convenience) we read about different types of light and above all about a divine light purified by darkness, as if the sordid matter, the dark night, could not be conceived without a divine light and vice versa.

Similarly happens in the case of another great German mystic, Dominican theologian and heretic, Meister Eckhart (1260-1327), practically the same age as Jacopone, who in the so-called German Sermons addressed the question of darkness in its relationship with light. Commenting on the famous incipit of the Gospel of John ("In the beginning...."), Echkart states that "the Father generated [the Son] eternally from the hidden darkness of the eternal hiddenness", 5 then defining this original place as "the silent darkness of the hidden paternity ”. 6 The relationship between light and darkness in Echkart is no less dramatic than in Jacopone, although apparently more sophisticated and cultured: “What I know in God is light; what the creature touches is night. There is true light, where it does not touch any creature”. 7

But darkness has three "gradations" we could say, so that Man can see the true light, that is, a moment of visual blindness and detachment from earthly things, one of spiritual blindness and finally one devoid of any light, absolute darkness. In conclusion “God shines in a darkness, in which the soul escapes all light”. 8 Shining in the darkness is fundamental, because here the light is not light and the darkness is not darkness, but something more fundamental and radical.

If in the thick, mirrored darkness of Puglisi's paintings the light is absorbed as if it had been swallowed by a black hole, in the transfigured faces and gestures the white in turn is not pure light, but light mixed with darkness (and perhaps also with flesh, earth and blood if we carefully observe the presence of lashes of bright red and streaks of grey), precisely that "light of matter", that human and dirty light that Jacopone wrote about. Puglisi's night seems at times to light up and the light to darken and in this (secular) play of passages the (religious) torment of the great mystics comes true, brought to the conditions of a painting of our time, with all that follows.

The fact that apparently so out of time and complex literary sources were used to shed light on Puglisi's painting does not mean that his work is equally complex and out of time, but rather that it can be read immediately according to a historical and spiritual distance that makes it independent from contemporary influences and styles, giving it a stigma of negative relevance (in the sense of reduction) capable of overturning the clichés of cultured quotation, pictorial anachronism, nostalgia for the ancient which for many artists are conceptual and didactic crutches. Puglisi's missing figures are, they are, they live, they appear, they give themselves instantly, but in the same way they require that whoever looks at them relives that same dialectical polarity, that disagreement, that dramatic via negative that leads from darkness to light, which only poets mystics and heretics were able to represent and say in past ages.

We can finally, in conclusion, go back to seeing the essential elements of Puglisi's painting no longer with our eyes or with historical-critical thought, but with an intuition similar to that which activated the artist's creative process, an illumination that it allowed him first to obscure his sources, then to bring out luminous and earthly matter and finally to unite light and darkness in an unprecedented relationship, not optical, but mental and spiritual. Puglisi's painting transcends matter to climb the tree of knowledge, darkening himself to see the metaphysical light above him, blinding himself to see the eternal one within him. In this sense, his works are dimensional passages that lead towards other realities, which was ultimately the aspiration of the Great Masters of the past to which he has tirelessly referred in the last ten years.

There is a disturbing obsession that unifies this cycle of works, in which fragments of figures are moved as if they were crossed by perturbations, gravitational waves that arrive from collisions of black holes billions of years away. For this reason Puglisi needs to combine gestures with faces, because if the former are fixed as points of equilibrium on the canvas (they are the origin of thoughts), the latter create displacements and decentralizations (they are the origin of actions), but at the same time they hook the disembodied figure into the deep darkness. Closer to physical paradoxes than actual missing bodies, Puglisi's immaterial figures ask us to be contemplated and to be participated, to be felt in their drama and in their mystical exaltation, in their precariousness and in their epiphany. They are shadows of light on the hard edge of the night, they are metaphors of what life ultimately is that emerges from nothing to return to its final destination, they are that warning of "being-for-death" which, instead of inducing desperation, makes us feel more alive, now and here and always projected forward, bringing us back to the vision of Meister Eichkart: “…and shone before them in that same transfiguration of the body that we will have in eternal life.”

Notes:

1 “Nel quarto fui poi levato: ‘l mio entelletto fu scurato… Ne lo sesto perdìo el sonno, tenebroso vidde el monno… Fui nel settimo approbato e doppio lume me fu dato”, Jacopone da Todi. Laudi, a cura di Claudio Peri, Fabrizio Fabbri Editore, Perugia, 2020, p. 237-238

2“Light is not light, light is corporeal”, Ibidem, p. 274

3 “O infigurable light, who can imagine that you wanted to inhabit the dark darkness? Your light does not lead anyone who wants to see you, to be able to measure what it is about you; I see at night that it is day, no virtue can be found, no one can give proof of you, who sees that splendor", Ibidem, p. 310

4“You are a divine light, purged of darkness”, Ibidem, p. 316

5Meister Echkart, German Sermons, edited by Marco Vannini, Adelphi, Milan, 1985, p. 9

6Ibid., p. 53

7Ibid., p. 214

8Ibid., p. 215