Saggi Critici

Valerio Dehò (2018)

Light of darkness

Lorenzo Puglisi starts from the body silence to reach the truth of painting. His is a journey into the heart of darkness, where light appears as intermittent signals. His presence is announced by flashes, signals, apparitions. Body and painting are two extremes intersecting in the perception of feeling through and beyond the senses. The human body can also be read as a landscape, a human geography that reflects the celestial vault. The body of painting, on the other hand, reflects man’s ability to go beyond reality, but not outside, rather within it. There is no competition, rather an opposition that recalls alterity, otherness. The sphere of what can be perceived through knowledge is mirrored into the one of what can be perceived through the senses, opening the doors of a different knowledge because it is based on novelty and not on repetition. As Guido Ceronetti wrote, the body is silent, it is paint- ing that must speak without saying. The former gets its power from its belonging to nature, from its being a fundamental element of nature. The latter needs to express itself, it must show that it is an episode of the language creation, the primitive articulation of a talk that perhaps will never begin and rep- resents the wait of revelation which doesn’t exist yet because it does not belong to the form yet.

It is interesting to observe Puglisi’s way to look at the world. He began over a decade ago by giving life to a people of solitary, deep characters defined by their being uncertain, tremulous. In their faces he looks for that solitude of the high spirits which is the goal of figurative painting. The eyes, as in Francis Bacon, have no longer the function of “win- dow of the soul” that they could have in classical portraiture until the twentieth century. They are often eyes that do not look, blind: after all, they must be looked at. And passive, because they are the revelation, the faces around them are a reverberation, a halo of sick luminescence. This instability reveals a relationship with the viewer who does not understand where the focus of the image is. They absorb the look, giving back a mode of existence that stands between body and painting, in an intermediate area, a dead zone still unknown, which requires a journey to show itself, and silence to appear.

It is also difficult to talk about realism concerning his works, not only because reality does not always have to do with truth, but above all because it is the definitive renunciation to Metaphysics silence. This is why his works had fossil colours at the beginning, almost as if they were a thickened and inert magma. Anyway there wasn’t any plastic value that was misleading and distracted from the silence of the body. Man’s skin is a kind of epithelial base on which painting paints its own skin. A second skin, then, but not as a trick, to conceal the real. We are not dealing with a habitus strengthened by feelings and conventions. The second skin of painting is a highlight of defects and lacunae, but also of sensuality, of life, because we experience and share love, pleasure and death through the body.

Lorenzo Puglisi uses the sign of painting as an excavation, the colour seems to have a presence, and for this reason the artist uses it sparingly, almost to avoid being tempted and seduced. Are we sure that meat needs to be represented, i.e. linguistically scanned, to bring it closer to a reality that is never sta- ble, never steady? Meat needs this will, we must never believe in it till the end. The London School, with Freud and Bacon, has been able to tell us stories of this kind. The post Baconian painting by Lorenzo Puglisi on the one hand is a sign, scratches more than any other, removes and never adds, in spite of technique and second skin. On the other hand it is as if it catalysed the elements of the catastrophe. The body must be examined as a fault on the verge to break, like a clay that suffers dangerous violations from inside. A universe of feelings and reflections is actualized in some sort of hyperbole of the existence, in a concentration of painful and unbearable life, as if each elementary particle of painting became as heavy as a stone, as thick as pitch. Lorenzo Puglisi began by practicing a form of expression that we could define as adult, accepting the com- parison with tradition. Not only does he favour the portrait against the other painting genres, but above all he wants to face the “genres”, that is those forms crystallized by time passing by and repeated teachings that have brought about criteria of realization.

Perhaps the most interesting and mysterious aspect consists in seeing in this process a punctum, a situation of balance, of being contemporary. History needs the present to come true, to be incarnated. Meat, once more. As Mario Praz said much better than me, the carnality of the body, its substance, recalls death, its change of state implies also the loss of form. The unstable is eternal, what lasts probably is not human, while the substance of our bodies does not have the lightness of dreams but the certainty of the end. Adrian Ghenie, for example, does some- thing similar when he uses his violent and irrational painting to analyse and dig, even from the point of view of pictorial technique, into the characters of his series Gallery of Portraits. He is interested in exposing the monstrous aspect of characters, as if painting were a way to go into reality even when it has already become past, if not history, to reveal its most secret gasps. Ghenie paints also environments, sets, though often remaining in the classical dimensions of the portrait. He does not leave his characters alone, but places them in a defined and often recognizable spatiality. He sets them up and comforts them by putting objects and memories around them. But his is a manner that often links art and society, joining with a double bond rites and myths in the best tradition of art history. We can easily understand that in both cases the use of the word Expressionism can give on the one hand a sufficiently clear idea of the linguistic typology, but on the other we need to add something else, since the young artists born in the Seventies do not repeat the schemes but reinvent them. The brushstrokes, the streaks, the colour almost thrown are not epiphenomena of something already seen, but a kind of approach to an art that has too often put aside painting to meet shortcuts or post-conceptual escape ways. In this case it means making art meet a vision of the present, certainly not the stylistic features of the currents of the early twentieth century.

Lorenzo Puglisi’s contemporary attitude lies precisely in never looking back. Even when, as in the exhibition at Galleria Il Milione in 2016, he revisited a series of famous por- traits of the past, rereading them through his habit of looking for light in the dark, for flashes of darkness. The obscure is for him the condensation of light, not its absence, his technique supports him in characterising the painting according to a key in which values are reversed. His painting is accomplished through progressive thickening and sudden clarifications that grant a diffused light, a reverberation that does not lighten, but thickens the matter further. There are no sources, but brief appearances that produce the enigma of glances towards an indefinite and unstable directionality. The detail of the hands is triangulated with the face in a secret geometry. Even in his recent paintings, where he abandons the portrait, he resorts to a procedure of visual simplification to draw inspiration from the history of art. The result is a visu- al theatre, some sort of staging of classical painting, and perhaps this is why Lorenzo Puglisi calls them Scenes. On the one hand, it “deletes” most of the painting, the com- position, or rather simplifies it by reducing it to minimal elements, to the real ultimate constituents of the image. Matteo e l’angelo, Nell’Orto degli Ulivi, Il Grande Sacrificio, Narciso, or L’Ultima Cena, so Goya, Caravaggio, Correggio or Leonardo da Vinci, are masterpieces and artists whom Puglisi resorts to develop his idea of painting. This needs little and much at the same time. Little, because the visual elements are created by whites, hints of red or yellow that briefly light up the image. His is a work of reduction, like focusing the gaze on one point does not mean to forget the rest, but to determine a direction, an essentiality. This reductio is important because it includes one of the elements of contemporaneity, that is memory excess, and makes it a matter of choice. Not a simplification – here we must be careful with words – but the ability to assess what is painting and what is not. Much, because Puglisi does not draw inspiration from past masterpieces, he performs an action of making the past his own, eliminating waste and narrative excesses as we can read them to- day. It provides a critical and updated review. Not a procedure similar to Tino Stefanoni in the Eighties, with his series of paintings entitled Cleptomania, in which from paintings of past artists to whom he was of- ten inspired, as Beato Angelico, he took de- tails that later became the main subject of the painting itself. Lorenzo Puglisi uses the works of the past as paradigms to be updated, like files that are too cumbersome, too “heavy” and that for this reason must be zipped. But in this way he creates the space for his paint- ing, turning the black background into a place of events.

Black represents also memory. The traces of painting, the sabrecuts seeming fast even if they are the result of an almost Zen meditation in front of the surface, are epiphanies that emerge from the distance. The artist knows that such an art must inevitably tend to perfection. He must seek the radical nature of the unrepeatable gesture. Mental and gestural in painting are balanced. They do not seek a meeting point, but a temporary stability. Since from the original works we are left with gestures, a face, a hand, traces, the started path is necessarily dynamic. In any case, painting is added, it is not born by sub- traction. Conceptually there is the over- shadowing of elements of the work that the artist chooses not to consider. And since Puglisi creates various versions for each subject, distinguished by format and also for slight variations in the scheme, then one can understand how his analysis proceeds and is truly such without relaying only on a simple intuition. Bacon felt the need to frame his characters, to give them a place of living. His pictorial creatures, often overwhelmed by winds of light and heat, or deformed under the pressure of existential discomfort, must have some reference points. The painter creates them. The rooms, the chair of Innocent X, what he himself called Invisible Rooms, the same composition of his triptychs, as if they were altarpieces, arise from the need to give a place to his characters, that are often solitary and need a comfort de- limiting the space. But these places are also prisons, coercive limits. Painting (or life?) creates cages from which you can no longer escape.

Lorenzo Puglisi’s black works represent a space engulfed by the lack of colour. The arising from the dark is an escape, a search for light. His reaching the sacred through the masterpieces of art history seemed inevitable. The “ugly” in the West appears through the suffering Christ. The realism of the blood from the ribs, the crown of thorns, the experience of death for a God had never existed before. No ideality can transfigure the loss, the absence. In 1851 Karl Rosenkranz theorized that the Aesthetics of the Ugly would inspire art in the years to come. The ideal of beauty is good for post- cards and for boxes of sweets. Realism, the smell of bodies, the stink of decomposition entered art. In the essay La carne, la morte e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica (1930), Mario Praz deals with the changes of the idea of beauty in Europe and mentions the “beauty blurred by death” that began in the seventeenth century, spread to the pre-romantic, like Novalis, and then reached Baudelaire and the whole twentieth century.

Painting cannot linger to describe the curls of Correggio’s or Bellini’s puttini, the black light of Caravaggio has become a magma that has obscured the sky of painting and covered the history of art with ashes. Puglisi knows that beauty is difficult, that the de- formed, the undetermined are names establishing a relationship with the invisible. For this reason he uses oil painting, to maintain a link with a strong tradition of painting, and at the same time he has been able to build his own universe in which recollection is nigredo, a phase of the alchemical process where the matter must be decomposed to return to the original chaos and make creation possible. Destruction precedes every birth. Christ dies to rise again. “Solve et coagula” was the motto of alchemists: we must resort to something similar in front of these pictures. Dante starts from Hell and its perpetual fire to climb and reach the perfection of ideas, to bridge the distance from Paradise. Caravaggio himself had repeatedly mentioned the alchemical initiations in his paintings. Black is not a colour, or rather is a colour but in a peculiar, extreme way, like the painting by Puglisi. This is why it takes on a symbolic value that brings it closer to the Jungian archetypes. We can say that black is a colour looking for you, not waiting to be looked at. One of Saturn’s messengers, of his leaden mood that has accompanied much of the history of art and man.

Condition of birth or rebirth, the emergence from the dark can become a positive condition even if nothing is completely defined, as if light flooded the depths of painting with mystery. Perhaps the enigma of existence lies in its conclusion, in its annulment. Lorenzo Puglisi’s paintings are all this, because they do not deny painting but exalt it. They hint at death without announcing it. They pretend a gestural rapidity that they do not have be- cause they want to suggest the urgency of liv- ing, the need of choosing a detail, something to save in order to bring oneself into a dimension in which temporality is not just crowded with memory. His work suggests a freedom that arises from erasing the prisons of space and time to build a present that does not need to look back like the Angelus Novus and is not ashamed to build its own past, always, every time.