Alberto Mazzacchera (2024)
Lorenzo Puglisi. Between Vanitas and the Sacred
The potent and yearned-for beginning of Lorenzo Puglisi’s artistic path was a mix of wandering around the great European and American cities and holding down occasional jobs to cover the basics and have enough cash to immerse himself in great museums. Having studied humanities in secondary school, cultural comparison, knowing about art and knowing about making art had the status of primary, ineluctable need. For Puglisi (Biella, 1971), rambling around Europe with a one-way ticket was a bit like the Grand Tour of the past.
An educational and initiatory trip undertaken by the scions of the ruling class and the upper echelons of Europe, the Grand Tour was oriented towards the discovery of Italy in particular, a country that had been for millennia a historical deposit of immeasurable depth and prestige, enjoying a central position in European civilisation and its sphere of influence. In a modern variation, Puglisi, like many young Italians of his generation, spent long stretches in London (probably the artist’s favourite city), Paris, Miami, Los Angeles, Berlin, Amsterdam, Barcelona and Copenhagen.
His study of great artists was stringent and his probing of their works meticulous. Lacking specific artistic training, as had been the case, for that matter, for the brilliant precursor of the prolific Milan currents of the postwar avant-gardes, Piero Manzoni (1933–1963), Puglisi searched and analysed every detail to work out the secrets of the art of the Italian and European masters. And so, the world of art that surrounded him started to fill up and structure itself around precise coordinates.
Among his favourite artists we find Rembrandt (1606–1669), and he mentions in particular his famous Portrait of Jan Six, a painting made in 1654 that is still in the Six Collection in Amsterdam. Rembrandt depicted his friend Six (an art patron, writer and collector born to a family originally from France) in an ordinary moment of everyday life, as if he were just about to leave the house and so is slipping on his gloves. Wearing gloves being an essential precaution, given the importance of having well-kept hands, not just for aesthetic reasons but as a clear indication of class, which was also broadly stressed, for that matter, by a whole series of other elements like the richness of the wearer’s clothing. The figure is masterfully rendered against a black background that reveals nothing of the context. He stands out from this backdrop with his colourful clothing, the apex of which is the sumptuo-us cloak in a precious red hue that would have been especially costly, the industrial production of chemical dyes still being centuries away. This bright hue was an open homage to Six’s personality and his flourishing activity in connection with the textile trade and silk dying, since it was foreign to Rembrandt’s choices: the artist, good Calvinist that he was, as a rule used a very spare palette. 1 What drew Puglisi’s attention, alongside the powerful black background, was the rendering of the clothing, the gold buttons and the profusion of gold military-inspired braiding. Rembrandt masterfully depicted it all with a few quick, incisive brushstrokes, using a technique that the Impressionists would pick up and refine about two centuries later. It was a fundamental lesson, learned by Puglisi through direct and repeated study of the painting, which he never forgot.
Puglisi started painting his first small-scale works in 2006: all portraits. But, as he recalls, ‘the subjects of those portraits came from photos or memory. I wanted them to have a non-linear, vital quality and express something I hadn’t seen before, something that could surprise me.’ The choice of the small format was strictly economic: ‘they were small canvases simply because I didn’t have a lot of money’. The portrait was therefore deliberately released from the psychological dimension of the sitter, as attested by the titles, reduced to the generic term ‘portrait’ paired with a number used for purely archival purposes. What interests Puglisi is the human cranium, since, for him, there is ‘nothing more interesting and vital than a human head, it touches me deeply, reminding me of the fact of existing, of life itself.’ 2 Puglisi’s portraits only later expanded to include one or both hands.
If portraits are Puglisi’s genesis, then we will do well to start from them, to understand the force and innovative breadth of his painting. The human head, which is variously crowned or shaved in consecration ceremonies, symbolises both the seat of vital force and the point of animic appearance. The face is the hinge of intersubjectivity. It is the double-edged border or threshold between interiority and exteriority, concealing one’s interior thoughts or expressing them, even sometimes simply betraying them. But in Puglisi’s work, the powerfully close-up framing, entirely focused on the human head portrayed without concession to other parts of the body, does not allow for communication of the expression of the face or mood. It is only in the later portraits and the ‘scenes’, in which one or both hands are included, that the viewer can attempt to attribute an expression to the face, to ‘give a face to the face’, 3 which in any case remains an entirely personal impression not necessarily shared by others. Puglisi’s unconcealed intent, for that matter, is not to portray the head of a specific person, realism and psychological rendering both being entirely foreign to him. This approach helps us to understand how Puglisi’s figures are fully distinct from those of Francis Bacon (1909–1992), his other favourite painter. Bacon’s figures often include a whole array of precise details that are deliberate citations of reality. Of course, the reference to Bacon’s transfigurations cannot help but be constant, but, as rightly observed by Crespi, ‘Reflecting in his own way on the great painter, Puglisi takes a further step towards a still unknown destination’. 4
Because, beyond the deliberate difficulty of deciphering the facial expressions, often insurmountable due to the absence of hands, Puglisi’s figures are perceived differently by the viewer once a certain physical distance from the painting has been exceeded. All morphological reference is lost and the painting, the culmination of vigorous, thick brushstrokes, looks like an accumulation of formidable luminous lumps surrounded by a kind of fathomless wall of dark matter. This sensation increases when looking at Puglisi’s works on panel, in which the dark surface, created with multiple layers of paint, becomes total, absolute black, in many cases acquiring the shine of impalpable fluid surfaces. And so, at close range, the dazzling, formless material that thickens on the surface emerges in the temporary stillness of a precarious equilibrium ready to snap, in the flash that precedes becoming form or in the final moment that marks the entanglement of the universal forces in the dark magma. The elusiveness of the figures and the liquidity that renders them fleeting and constantly changing has led Meneguzzo to say that in Puglisi’s work, the human being is ‘no longer “posed”’. 5
All of this cancels out any attempt to see Puglisi as a possible exponent of the conservation of the painting tradition. Recourse to the great painters of the past is of course clear in his works, in particular the ones he call ‘scenes’. But this need, which is in no way nostalgic, is exhausted in simply drawing from the formidable repertoire of gestures, movements, faces and poses that are grandly represented in great painting, as if it were an excep- tional distillate that countless generations of artists have worked on over the centuries. Meneguzzo has observed that ‘Puglisi’s post-ideological approach (which comes naturally to him, without the torment of self-critique and justification) is perfectly consistent, and contemporary, with what is happe- ning in the rest of the globalised art world, where painting does not need to justify itself and citation is just an element like any other, without negative connotations (a case in point is the concept of ‘meme’ on the internet!) and widespread. 6 On the other hand, one cannot forget the lines written by the natura- lised British poet and essayist T.S. Eliot in 1939, as the winds of war were taking shape in the midst of distressing ideologies: ‘And what there is to conquer by strength and submission, has already been discovered once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope to emulate – but there is no competition – there is only the fight to recover what has been lost and found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions that seem unpropitious.’ 7
Puglisi’s a-dogmatic citation of the past, seen in particular in his ‘scenes’, is far from an attempt to revive lost languages. Instead, its results can be admired, with an eye free from deceptive nostalgia, as expressions that have in some instances reached lofty peaks, rising to the status of master-pieces, not of a specific culture, but of humanity.
In Puglisi’s work, continuity with the painting of the past, alongside all-absorbing interest in the human figure, can be traced in his almost obsessive attention to painting technique. However, in works in which one is searching for timeless humanity, limiting oneself to just a few elements to represent the body (head, hands, sometimes a foot), the difficulty in making the painting is immense, and those few elements, selected with care, must be of extremely high quality. Puglisi paints directly on the white canvas. His choice of the elements for the painting is often preceded by ‘drawings and smaller paintings that are not tests but rather part of the process of searching for the most intense image possible’. As the artist explains, ‘during this process, I am especially interested in the materials that shape the hands, the faces, its density and colour. I manipulate this oil-based paint substance with a degree of detachment – I would say that I am at once both actor and spectator – and, if something appears, I try to push it further and render it more intense, also using the black paint of the background, a mix of blacks, reds, browns, sometimes even blue. I first enclose the figures and then gradually the whole canvas with the atmosphere this creates. This requires waiting for the paint to dry, which can take three or four days, giving me time to look at the piece calmly and apply more black in multiple layers. This process of applying paint and waiting for it to dry can take a few weeks. It allows me to obtain density and distinctive tonalities and, at the same time, inevitably, to change the outline of the figures, sometimes the figures themselves. In other words, it allows me to “picto-sculpt” the resemblances that have emerged with a darkness that invades the field.’ 8
To be sure, as observed by Crespi, ‘the analysis of the human face, the disintegration or reconfirmation of features that are familiar to us, is shared by many young contemporary painters. Although they have different backgrounds and styles, they seem to be driven by similar impulses, a kind of third expressionism that investigates … the human condition.’ 9 But I believe that there is in Puglisi’s work an undeclared search that concerns his personal spiritual journey. A journey that has, in certain ways, points of contact with what Mancuso is proposing when he writes that ‘the matter our bodies are made of is nothing more than condensed energy, or better still, energy that is continually condensed due to the vortex of billions of relationships between the basic elements.’ And that the ‘surplus of energy compared to the mass of matter is what makes the body alive, ensouled.
At this first level of being, the soul is the surplus of energy compared to the material configuration of the body.’ Mancuso makes a distinction between the vegetative soul of plants and a superior, graduated animal soul, a sensitive soul that encloses the properties of the vegetative one within itself. A soul that reaches its apex in humans as the spirit, or the pinnacle of the soul, that Mancuso defines as ‘the emotion of intelligence’. Reflecting on this the- me, Simone Weil observed that ‘the Greek word that is translated as ‘spirit’ literally means igneous breath, a breath combined with fire, and referred, in antiquity, to the concept that contemporary science defines with the term energy’.10
In this sense, I believe that Puglisi’s luminous heads and figures, immersed in a dark magnetic dimension, could also be in some way representations of entities that cannot be perceived by the human eye, exceptional manifestations of the spiritual energy of the human being.
Notes:
1 M. Pastoureau, D. Simonnet, Il piccolo libro dei colori, Milan, Ponte alle Grazie 2016.
2 M. Meneguzzo, Lorenzo Puglisi, Milan, Skira 2002.
3 Ibid.
4 A. Crespi, Sulla linea del nero, in Lorenzo Puglisi, exhibition catalogue, Villa Cusani Tittoni Traversi, Desio 2014.
5 Meneguzzo, Lorenzo Puglisi, op. cit.
6 Ibid.
7 Eliot, T. S., in The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I, Faber & Faber 2015.
8 Meneguzzo, Lorenzo Puglisi, op. cit.
9 Crespi, Sulla linea, op. cit.
10 V. Mancuso, L’anima e il suo destino, Milan, Raffaello Cortina Editore 2007.
© Lorenzo Puglisi 2024
lorenzopuglisi27@yahoo.it