Observing the daylight through the texture of leaves of a tree and making it an opportunity for meditation, a hypnotic gateway to the mystery of things, slipping between the folds of the great generative joint: the figure of Being and Non-being, the necessary and dialectical overlap between life and death, opposite, indivisible, like the illuminated object and its shadow projected on the ground. The Japanese have only one word for this experience of the eye and the spirit: komorebi. Light, nature, contemplation as a mechanism spontaneously induced by a simple kaleidoscope of glimmers and a light rustling of leaves in the sun.
Luca Pancrazzi’s exhibition in Palermo
Luca Pancrazzi (Figline Valdarno, 1961. Lives in Milan), one of the most significant Italian artists of the generation that emerged in the Nineties and present in Palermo with a solo show at RizzutoGallery, christens with this evocative term some works from his well-known series of white acrylics on white: pictorial windows intended as manifestations of pure light, flashes in which to look for the subtle atmospheric modulations which, over a period of time ideally condensed on canvas, define the substance of the air and draw the unstable outline of the images.
White pigment mixed with chalk to prepare the canvas and then to paint landscapes and still lifes on it, pushing the background towards the emerging image itself, and vice versa. Where painting lacks the neutral, it declines again for opposites: the darker tones of the void are themselves painting, that is, visual and constructive matter, still working on the infinitesimal, on the relationship between zero and everything, on gradients and vibrations. Retinal, shadowy, dust-like painting, in which philosophy, optical phenomena and pure poetry seem to coincide.
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Painting and poetry in the works of Luca Pancrazzi
Ut pictura poësisit is appropriate to say, taking up the poet’s successful Latin phrase Horaceof which that saying of Simonides of Ceos was the ancestor (6th -5th century BC) reported by Plutarch: “Dixit Simonides picturam esse poesim tacentem, poesim picturam loquentem“, or painting is “a silent poem, and poetry a speaking painting”. Not trivially and romantically a poetic way of painting, but, as in the case of Pancrazzi, the ability to conceive pictorial practice as an epiphanic eventwriting made of illuminations, delving into the meshes of thought and language, as well as forms and pigment.
Pancrazzi’s out-of-register images
An electrocution that lays bare the real and returns it to the modified, extended, altered eye, opened onto invisibility and certain depths not commonly grasped by the gaze. Here it is “out of register” which for the artist is a key concept, used as the title of some works and in the exhibition transformed into a painted tautology, with a large opening diptych: two words, two windows, different tones of white, unlimited openings of meaning and space. The non-aligned image is out of register, staggered with respect to its concrete referent, it is the eternal return of the same, in a circle in which the difference insinuates itself at every turn, and it is that double that contemplates the error, the waste, the inexact superposition. Therefore, a story that is not news but literature, painting that is not mimesis but reinvention.
Pancrazzi’s appears to be a formidable demonstration of how poetic image and pictorial evocation can mix their molecules, miraculously, to synesthetic pathways never fully explainable by reasoning. And speaking of Japanese terms, aren’t your landscapes little haikus? Rapid poems, whose exact grammar articulates and governs the chaotic complexity of nature, preserving a few grams of infinity. Uncontaminated places, anthropized suburbs, industrial areas, portions of territory that combine metropolises and wild spaces. Defined in rough concreteness of coloryet dug into the white of a “lightened metaphysics” – to quote a famous essay by Calvesi – the works on paper, canvas or photocopy seem caught in a compelling en plein air but then pushed towards abstraction (as in the works constructed with rigorous pointillism, including small holes or touches of colour).
So it is in the splendid picture gallery set up in one of the rooms: the sequence of 14 cards mixes urban views, fragments of vegetation, scenes of city traffic, cars, construction nets, trees and more trees, segments of the horizon, dark tunnels, dense woods intercepted by sparks of light , exploded in the incendiary red of a sunset or precipitated in the black-grey of twilight, of the night, of dreams themselves. Snapshots, it is worth saying: despite that gap, that out of register that unites and divides image and reality, we find ourselves faced with something that corresponds to this reality, almost by a magical act of chemical or spiritual impression.
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Works of art including painting, poetry, photography
And it’s right there photography the third actor in this story. Another important reference for Pancrazzi, who continues to collect and catalog hundreds of photographic images, keeping alive an endless archive, a reservoir of documents and references with which to nourish his drawing and painting.
The threads therefore continue to be knotted along this hypothesis of an intimate relationship between image and poetry, which in the case of the photographic shot takes on further meanings, reawakening the ghost theme, the echo of death, the moment stolen from the flow of chronological time and its eternization, the percentage of randomness contemplated in the recording of moving fragments, finally the acrobatics of the gaze that penetrates into the micro, that moves away into the macro, that it moves along oblique, underground, panoramic, non-natural lines. An enhancement of the eye, entrusting art, once again, with an extensive and revealing function with respect to the level of reality and everyday life. In photography, as in painting, as in poetry. Languages and forms, with their specificities, slide towards each other, transforming themselves into possible light in the enchantment of the artistic gesture and in its slow, methodical construction, between thought and language.
Helga Marsala
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