WILLIAM TODE - English

EXISTENTIAL DIMENSION IN

LORENZO ANTOGNETI’I’S NEW FIGURATION


-FIGURATIVENESS AS EVOCATION OF A CIVILIZTION OF IMAGES -

by William Tode

If we want to take the comprehension of Lorenzo Antognetti’s work over the happy intuition, we have to go back very far.
It was Ernest Cassirer, “the philosophy of the symbolic shapes (forms)” in 1931, to gather the beginning of the artiste expression, for differentiation from the mythical language, now distinctly and now jointly to the fabula (plot), to the ritual, to the magic.
But it was his student, Suzanne Langer, in “Feeling and shape 1963” to review the problem of shape and contents in the terms empirically compared (verified of “appearances”) or better of communicable shapes and of “emotional weight”, or better of “recoiled experiences”.
Any form of art makes use of different appearances, obtained by giving shape to distinguished materials.
Therefore, art is one, bat the matter, to have some meaning can’t set aside shapes and, indirectly, material - color.
The plastic arts are those in which is dominant the spatial dimension. This doesn’t mean that the “picture” hasn’t got a temporal dimension too, even though it is left in large scale, to the receptor who goes from a global vision to the details to go back, then to the whole so, for Lorenzo Antognetti’s paintings, not for the “still life” I introduce the concept of “virtual space”: the purpose of all the plastic arts is to articulate the visual shape and to present the same, so immediately expressive of the human feeling to be filled by the same feeling, like the subject of the perception, or at last, like the primary object.
This means that, for the observatory, the work of art doesn’t have to be only a shape in the space, but a confirmation of the space, of all the space given to it.
The virtual space, all being independent and not a local area of the real space, it’s a total system concluded in itself. Being it of two or three dimension, it’s continuous in all his possible directions and it’s infinitely plastic.
And discoursing on Antognetti’s “figurative” painting, the trees, tar tank (bin), clouds, the infinite horizon of his Etruscan Maremma and his faces and figures heightened by mysterious slanting sources, and his “flowers” non objective any more, but opulent and very refined, all form unexpected revelations for the expressive form for someone qualified of a wise visual creativity.
Everybody can be represented in the virtual sphere of forms purely apparent. But it isn’t the effective existence of the object or of the things presented, more correct evoked, that the artist understands better than others, in his fantastic and symbolic allusions.
It’s the appearance, of a visible, naturalistic objectivity, and the emotive weight of his strength, that the ligurian artist, now living in Tarquinia, perceives, while others restrict themselves in “reading” the title, of its effective nature, remaining on the level of its effective reality. Here it is then “the virtual space” objectified, the objectification of a romantic and contemplative nature, analytical and modest, austere and dreamy, that pleases itself narcissistically, to relate and to evoke with the shapes, color, previous events, coriander’s of life, of memory, of a non existential life that recharges itself, emotionally, of previous visual experiences.
From here the possibility of a semilogical speech.
Talking about the “emotive weight» of the Figurative Art I prefer using the term “evocation”, because this term declares something that never has to be forgotten: that Art doesn’t creates emotions, but limits itself to be symbol of it.
The introduction of the evocation as emotive symbolization, connects the critical speech to a larger dimension, that I would define anthropological.
The artist’s personality creates the pictorial message, giving its own interpretation of life and of the world in which it’s born.
This is a subjective work, because it isn’t a simple reflection of life and of the superficial things, like the Marxist critics have been theorized and favored, but is also “interpretation”, that is critical contribution even if of a different category from the scientific one. Between the “abstract” and “figurative” painting there are more shapes of transition that between music and poetry, but this doesn’t deteriorate the judgment of convenience.
The contraposition is significant when it’s something of accepted. When I say “atonal music” I say also “post-tonal music”.
A “serial” music borned autonomously and not for contraposition, should have a different semiological importance.
A critical reading of Lorenzo Antognetti’s artistic search and “figurative” language takes me to analyze not only the anthropological side but also the semiological one of its symbolistical and formal content.
In the case of painters, strongly innovating like, for example, El Greco, can came out the prejudice of a defect of analytical form, for those artists with anthropological, strong aspects, like it’s in Antognetti’s case.
Antognetti’s anthropology is an anthropology of the depth. An unconscious where there aren’t only instincts, in which the expression has been removed from the conscience, but it’s above all the matrix of the conscience, from which germs of new possibilities of life burst. Therefore we are far from surrealists, whose backbone is soaked of Freudian psychoanalysis and whose dreams are nightmares and shadows. We are, rather, near to Jung’s conceptions, so we have to go on over the personal unconscious, toward a collective one, that is the traces found in all men ‘s mind. Created from a mental course of our ancestors. Any artistic experience particularly exceptional is so because it cames to fill an unconscious, original trace.
But Lorenzo Antognetti has built its own “archetypes” through a personal suffering, that is through a series of experiences with exceptional demands, and not through a program.
Antognetti’s search it has been an interior process, that has often found a thread in the “myth of the classicism”, of the big, museum tradition. Here we can find those esthetical and formal incentives that helped him to mature some artistic choices saturated with a striking “trade of ancient shop” that reveals him to us “Maestro” in the trend of that “Cultured Museum Art” from which has taken nourishment and ideals. He remands me De Chirico’s art, the one, to be clear, of “Italy’s Squares”, not that “barocco”, rhetorical and pompous of the decades.
In the ligurian artist live together, wisely mixed Caravaggio’s spatial, plastic spirit, for the intensely dramatic dynamism of the drapings, that have a formal and powerful valence and, above all, those private atmospheres of the “Flemings” with their magic, naturalistic and narrative eye, Flanders’ painters with their analytical vision, suspended between immanent objectivity and symbolistic and allusive metaphysics.
I have talked about “flowers and still life” that are only a shadow in the past and immanent objectification in Antognetti’s creativity; these “floreal” compositions are the figurative reason to annotate and define graphic-pictorial elements permeated of internalised luminescences that live, almost, of a mystic reflected light.
It’s the same “theatrical” light of “scene” that was Caravaggio’s big luministic-plastic revolution, man of “theatre”, loading actor himself of a tragic and epic page of a “dairy” of a daily and tragic experience.
The “light” energy that models shapes and defines microscopical figures of mute timbric and molecular essences, takes all the essence and the pictorial contest of Antognetti’s compositions, which have maestri’s evocative and descriptive power that have made “big” the Art in the centuries.
Ligurian artist’s language swings magically and insidiously between the meanders of an ipotetical “classicism» and of an “academicism”, that, for sure, represent the antipodes of the real art, but that in him, acquires a new end unknown energy, for that titanic and absolute spatiality, that
reminds me of Piero Della Francesca’s “parietal” silence, and the dynamic and plastic ferment of Boccioni’s spatiality.
Yet, this judgment of mine seems insane if we look superficially to the work of our artist, but if we understand completely the subtended meaning of the compositive and dynamic components of all the big, pictorial compositions, and of some landscapes with wide rift of infinite horizon damped of astonished silences, we will understand, almost with dismay and wonder, that we are in front of an innovative proposal of a “new figuration”, free from evocative tie of a remote past, that even if fundamental for the civilization of the culture, today, can’t be taken as a model and archetype for our aesthetic and artistic requests.
The originality and the valance of Lorenzo Antognetti’s painting are about this.
In front of a society always more idolatrous of that new golden calf, like the robot and the consumism and market’s economy of the mondialization there are only three ways: escape, refuge in the trascendency and the reconstruction of immanency.
Antognetti’s fundamental answer is the third one, which is also the most daring, because rebuilds the immanence and remains open to the trascendency. This is very risky because can take to the eclecticism.
Danger can be eluded only by those exptional events, that I call “enlightenments”. This has happened in Antognetti’s painting.
He has elaborated in the deep of his conscience a more religious deepening of the quality of Nature and of all the things of creation.
The Art that talks about GOD, it moans for man; the Art that names MAN, it languishes for GOD.
Next to this enlightenment goes another Promethean one, for which aren’t the spirits of Heaven or Hell to dominate the physical nature, but the soul and the spirit in him, hidden like the fire in the Flintstones. It’s the knowledge, above all, to complete LOVE.
Leonardo’s son, Dionysian archetype who comes from Ellenic languor’s, for Pitagora and for the Gnostics, is reinterpreted as capacity of transforming the world and not as pure contemplation.
Just like the tree of good and evil of Paul Valery ... “You can drive back the infinite / the effect of your growth, / and of the grave up to the nest / feel the knowledge…”.
Sign of a real myth is his power to appear - to his own creators like literal truth, even against the strongest adversenesses.
Myth as the appearance of a most sacred truth, that asking in what way is real, or calling it figure of the language, and destroying a myth means to shatter an idea in its primitive stage, in the same moment that appears in someone‘s mind.
Therefore, we have to place shape and colors, in a way to built a “virtual space”, able to evocate an experience in which we add at the same time, thought, dangerous task because is necessary to avoid opposite rocks, that not even common talents always knew how to avoid.
Let’s think about Blake, in whose “opera” the “thought” is often too open, and about Mòréau, with his giving into the sensuousity of the symbol.
The abstraction has acquired full autonomy and the figurativeness is reviewed, like in Antognetti’s, who has expressed himself with high expressive and formal levels, hoarding the phenomenal image like leitmotiv conductor of his pictorial symphonic nature, that privileges the crepuscolar atmosphere, interiorised of a radiance filled with a wistfulness in which the “nostalgia” charges itself with an existential and lyric emotivity.
There is, of course, in Antognetti’s musicality of the shapes and colors of the most completed works a poem’s temptation: the danger is that the basic elements could be the shapes and colors on its own and not as a way of evocation. So in the lyrical music the words absorbed from the music itself. But, in most case, the musicality stops to a limit paragonable to a “plainchant”: shapes’ and colors modulation gravitates around an evocation of a nature, magnificent in its shades of colors where the
dominant red determines the same “greater” tonality giving to it intensity of life. WILLIAM TODE