PHILOSOPHY'S RETURN TO PAINTING

The marvelous work of Italian painter Paolo Sabbatini Rancidoro helps us see what is missing in American art.

At some point, American painting lost its mind. Artists use painting therapeutically, producing work that carries personal meaning often inaccessible to most viewers. Or they paint within a political dialogue about gender or commercialism or the media – Big Polemical Issues. Others turn their back on subject per se to concentrate on formal matters, composition, and the picture plane. The latest trend is pure decoration. It’s been a long time since American artists at the center dared to use paint to explore poetic and humanistic themes aiming toward – can we still say the words?—philosophical knowledge.

Rancidoro’s neo-romantic painting and calligraphy are erudite meditations on the paradoxical natures of the human condition: We are thoughtful, logic-seeking creatures who are overrun by great, irrational passions. We aspire to virtue even as we sin. We are hopelessly time bound, but hunger for timeless certitudes. We pillage and we paint.

Drawing from myth, classical literature, Christian ritual, psychoanalysis, and a variety of non-western sources Rancidoro takes a subject, like fire, then builds and oeuvre of work around it. Each piece has its own integrity while serving as a stanza in the overall composition. This “visual poetry” sets up a meaningful dynamic between the works of art themselves, and offers the patient viewer a more sophisticated art experience than contemporary exhibits in which we get versions of the same composition – or screed – in different colors.

Dreams are most often the source of inspiration for Rancidoro’s painting. The Triptych of Time (1999) uses elements from a nocturnal dream to create a cosmological landscape. The painting is divided into three panels representing past, present, and future or morning, noon, and evening. A dormant volcano dominates the middle foreground, while a reclining figure stretches across the horizon line with his head in the first painting. The figure might be a self-portrait, a sleeping Rancidoro who did dream, one night, of painting a triptych of time. Or it could be a death mask, the dead past that stretches itself out as roots under our own time.

The middle panel – the present or midday – is the most densely filled with mountain peaks and coastal planes, the heights and flatlands of our daily preoccupations. The volcano signifies the unpredictable power of nature and of fate, as well as the explosive energy of human creativity, a reading suggested as well by other Rancidoro volcanos such as A Volcano (1999) and Still Alive (1999).

Describing the dream that led to the painting, Rancidoro remembers a fish flying through his mind. He reproduced the image. In the figurative morning, the fish is unfettered and lively. By noon it is engaged in the land, held by the volcano. In the final panel the fish disappears into a tunnel, which Rancidoro interprets as the subconscious. He also points out the image of a dragon, coiled on the coast of the future. “It is difficult to explain things from the subconscious. A fish is free, flying, because it is out of the water. Then there are the shadows of terror.”

Rancidoro sees no conflict between using psychoanalytic symbolic devises and mythic of religious imagery. He explains, “I try to open my mind and my heart to the true essence of things as I perceive it when I pray or when I dream – those are two different degrees of the same nature. Literary sources are always filtered through this process, and I believe that myths are composed of the same substance of the dreams—these are collective dreams.”

Castor and Pollux: Ignis Fatuus (2000) uses a Greco-Roman myth as the point of departure for a captivating landscape. Castor and Pollux were twin brothers, separated by the fate of God. The brothers reach a compromise with God to allow them to spend alternate days in Heaven and Hell. Thus, their division is maintained but a separation between body and soul is healed, clearly one of Rancidoro’s goal as well. In the painting, ocean and land stand for the separation of Castor and Pollux and the coexistence of opposite states.

Rancidoro sometimes uses exotic settings and non-western cultural references to underscore his observation that daily life and sacred life are better integrated in traditional societies. The artist, who has traveled extensively, has a strong following in Pakistan where, last year, he designed the scenery and costumes for a national opera production of “Mozart Seductions”. Aficionados of Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi noted a similarity between the sculptor’s references and Rancidoro’s blend of mysticism and tradition when Rancidoro’s work was displayed near Brancusi’s work in several major museums in Romania earlier this year.

In The Towers of Silence (1999), a burning fire represents sacrifices performed by the Zoroastrian cult of Ahura Mazda, a secretive group which originated in Mesopotamia, in Central Asia. Zoroastrians believe that the world is sharply divided between good and evil, such that something is either good or evil, never a variable mixture in between. Rancidoro challenges this by setting up a pictoral confusion between reality and its reflection: a firey altar, enclosed in stone, is reflected in water. Which is real? In art, both the hall of prayer and its watery reflection are mutually reliant illusions, as is the notion that pure good and pure evil are perfectly counterpoised in the world.

One of the most unusual aspects of Rancidoro’s output – a baroque characteristic which contributes to its neo-romantic definition – is his use of calligraphy. The artist’s grandfather was and accomplished calligrapher; calligraphy was considered an art form in centuries past. Having lived in Arabic and Chinese culture, where calligraphy continues to be employed as a decorative art and as a medium for the divine (through written prayers), Rancidoro began incorporating calligraphy into his artwork in 1997.

The fire which ignites Rancidoro’s painterly and intellectual itinerary threatens to consume some of his exceptional work on paper. In handsome, apocalyptic pieces composed of china ink and acrylic on parchment, Rancidoro joins the civilizing elegance of stylized handwriting with the enduring power of literary text illustrated with fire.

Helen’s Roses (Roman Windows III) (1999) is an elegant example of this unity of image and word. A raging fire dead center threatens to completely obscure a letter between lovers. The missive’s calligraphy is framed by a window described as the writer’s position as she watched her lover drive away in a coach. The fire is, at once, the passion Elena describes and the smoke, the dispersion into air of it all – the lovers, their letters, their roses, and their tears. More than the words, and more than the destructive potential of the fire, it is in fact the window, cultural artifice that it is, which has the most solidity in this intellectual and aesthetic construct. Our artful compositions – whether in architecture, in fine art, or in music – are humanity’s enduring legacy, Rancidoro seems to say.

At several art historical moments, Italian art has served as a kind of antidote to American contemporary excess. When Pop Art and fascination with commercial culture threatened to drive social engagement entirely out of art in the mid-1960s, the Italian Arte Povera movement profoundly effected the reigning aesthetic with installations of common and unusual materials (twigs, rags, cement) used metaphorically, often idealistically.

In the late 1970s, when the figure and story-telling had virtually dropped out of art, and conceptual work dominated museums, Italian and German neo-expressionists (or, as the movement was termed in Italy, the transavantgarde) made painting central again, introducing allegory, history, and people back to the canvas.

We can only hope that more artist’s adopt Rancidoro’s classical ambition – to restore the redemptive power of art and to make painting a vehicle for knowledge – and his faith in the fundamental intelligence of artistic audiences worldwide.

Eleanor Kennelly

THE COSMIC BUTTERFLY

“Almirah” is not only the title which Rancidoro wanted to give to the Exhibition. There is a painting dated 1996 where we see a large wardrobe – an almirah, in fact – its doors to us, which touches the opposite sides of the painting and makes its own shape coincide with the space of the painting. Our view is thus entirely engaged by the space of the wardrobe funneled through the precise geometric reins of the perspective box.

The observer feels drawn towards the dark background of the wardrobe, which is lurking just beyond the alarm signal constituted by the red bar, from which hangs the bright silhouette of a coat and two deer antlers. However, this sinking effect does not last long: the walls do not have any depth, the perspective cage is like an empty frame which allow the air to go through.

And then the perception comes, of the total ambiguity of the spatial situation of where the observer finds oneself; hanging in the floating brightness of a cloudy sky, deprived of an horizon and of any other reference, we cannot find a possible terrestrial anchorage. Even the clear resemblance of the details – of which the painting abounds – looks strange and mysteriously intriguing. The resemblance seems to evoke familiar sights, seen for the first time as suspended on the threshold of our daily reality.

There is a famous quotation by Freud on this subject. He reckons that what one feels as disturbing (unheimlich), is in fact nothing new or unrelated. On the contrary, it is the return of “something familiar to the psychological life since remote times but only removed from it”.

Freud concludes that this disturbing feeling originates above all from the return of the idea of death, because there is nothing in us less unchanged since immemorial times than our relationship with death.

“Almirah” is thus the title of a dream image and perhaps the wardrobe is in fact as the artist suggests – a metaphor of the subconscious, of the desires and cravings erupting from the deep strata of our subjectivity. And yet, what Rancidoro proposes in his paintings is not a risky exploration beyond the bright threshold of our conscience, a sort of descent to Hades without a guarantee of return. He certainly feels an attraction for the discovery of the dark roots of the imagination. There, the icons of the painting acquire a semantic depth, a fluidity which disturbs the schematic process of reasoning.

From these concepts arise not only the initial impetus and the core of the thematic inspiration of Rancidoro’s paintings, but also many vivacious iconography suggestions, harmoniously translated in the framework of a sincere religious spirituality. I would say that this process goes through the language of dreams stimulated directly by Freudian thoughts, rather than through the surrealistic poetics.

All the above is in a way only the starting point, or if one prefer, the basis of Rancidoro’s paintings. In the end they depict the events of another adventure, joyfully played on the surface of the canvas. There is a wandering between the shades and the brightness of the blues, an emergence from tunnel-like passages to an explosion of limitless dawns; a flight of fantasy running after the reflections of light amid boats on a summer afternoon; the precarious beauty of the dance of diaphanous air bubbles; a race towards shapes and colors which no longer have the appearance of familiar things, but fly on the free space of the paingting like the wings of a cosmic butterfly, as the artist suggests.

Finally, the perspective box of the “Almirah” has opened up on the surface of the painting: what appears to us is no longer disturbing, but it looks like a vivid and changeable inlay of colors.

The paintings of Rancidoro do not recall anymore intricate and obscure chains of meanings; on the contrary, they weave under our eyes a network of echoes, of correspondence, of resounding which no longer bdistract us and they all come back to the bright domain of the painting, and exhalt the phenomenon’s beauty. This is the image, perhaps illusive but charming nonetheless, of an eternal present.

Vitaliano Corbi