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| Edward Lucie Smith is a British writer, poet, photographer, art critic, curator and author of exhibition catalogues. |
| Edward Lucie Smith Paola Gandolfi Miriam Mirolla La recherche de Ma Mére Marco Lodoli Una città di dipinta Miriam Mirolla Macchina Madre Alessandro Riva Le idee dentro Gianluca Marziani Sculpture exercises (micro and macro) |
PAOLA GANDOLFI version full PDF
di Edward Lucie Smith
Paola Gandolfi occupies a unique situation among contemporary Italian painters. Though nominally linked to the Pittura Colta (Cultivated Painting) movement that has exercised so much influence over the development of Italian art during the past two decades, she is in many respects much closer to the Surrealist painters of the first half of the 20th century.
In particular, she has an unabashed fascination with sexuality and an ability to invent emblematic forms reminiscent of the work of the great Belgian Surrealist René Magritte.
To this one must add the fact that she is a painter whose work has a strong feminist content, of a kind not common among her compatriots. Her feminism differs from that of the artists associated with the Feminist Movement in the United States not only because it is less directly political and more emotional and anguished, but also because it carries a strong religious overtone – a quality perhaps not always obvious to the artist herself. Anyone looking at the totality of Gandolfi's work becomes aware of elements in it that seem to refer to popular Catholicism. In particular many of her images seem to echo primitive votive pictures and other items left in churches by the faithful in order to give thanks, or to act as visible symbols of a prayer for help in curing some disability. In addition to the link to Magritte, there is also one to the work of Frida Kahlo, whose paintings were sometimes based on the retablos found in Mexican churches.
Nevertheless, there are also obvious «classical» elements in Gandolfi's work – for example, there is the acknowledged influence of Piero della Francesca, with his ultra-refined, subtly geometric forms. Gandolfi considers it essential for an artist to possess not only a sound technique, but a keen awareness of past, pre-Modernist achievements. She speaks, for example of the impact made on her by Piero's Madonna del Parto, and also by Pontormo's Deposition in Florence and Bronzino's Allegory (with Venus and Cupid) in London. It is worth noting that these are all three of them paintings with an element of intractable strangeness, of removal from ordinary life.
One might in fact say that the union between strangeness and its opposite – complete familiarity – is one of the most important characteristics of Gandolfi's art.
Like all children, Gandolfi enjoyed making drawings. One of her early memories is of the fate of these drawings, which were dumped in a large earthenware pot by the nuns who taught in her school, then burned. She remembers the smoke going up and thinking that God – who better? – would now be able to see her work. The motif of flames surrounding a body, sometimes seen in her painting (e.g, Vertigine 3, 1997) probably stems from this childhood memory, though a comparison can also be made with paintings by Magritte that show musical instruments in flames.
As a young woman, Gandolfi passed through a phase, like many Italian artists of her generation, where she was not making paintings, but was, instead, creating installations and performances – some of these were inspired by Antonin Artaud's writings on the Theatre of Cruelty. In particular Artaud's ideas about the fragmentation and recomposition of the body have obvious significance when one is discussing Gandolfi's imagery. Here, for instance, is an Artaud self-portrait in words:
Who am I?
Where do I come from?
I am Antonin Artaud
and I say this
as I know how to say this
immediately
you will see my present body
burst into fragments
and remake itself
under ten thousand notorious aspects
a new body
where you will
never
forget me.
When she began to make paintings, imagery of this kind was a natural resource, not least because it also had links to her inherited Catholic tradition. Among the first severed body parts to appear in her work were severed heads – and here one immediately thinks of all the representations, in Christian art, of the Decollation of St John the Baptist, and also of paintings illustrating the story of Judith and Holofernes, in particular two celebrated compositions, one by Caravaggio, the other by Artemisia Gentileschi.
The decision to move back into painting, made at the beginning of the 1980s, was a bold one, since many of the prevailing artistic currents were against it. In particular, many members of the critical and curatorial establishment believed, and continue to believe, that paint on canvas is a medium of expression that has had its day. However, Gandolfi had increasingly come to feel that the Conceptual orthodoxy that had triumphed in the course of the 1970s was too rigid – that it cut artists off from many things that were nourishing in the broad history of art.
In Gandolfi's case, the decision was perhaps a little mitigated by the fact that she has no desire to be thought of as a realist. For her, the anatomies she represents, whether complete or fragmented, are purely mental constructions, things that come from within. They have, she says both psychological and social validity, but are never intended as representations of real events.
Gandolfi is well versed in psychoanalytic doctrine, having undergone analysis herself. She sees her paintings, in one aspect, as therapeutic objects – therapeutic for herself but also therapeutic for the spectator.
Some of her imagery comes directly from dreams, but, unlike the original Surrealists, she regards these dreams are not being completely sacrosanct: that is, she thinks of them as being only part of the creative process, not as things that require completely literal representation. In an interview with the critic Miriam Mirolla, published in Flash Art (June/July 1998), Gandolfi noted that «The invention of a painting is something mysterious, which responds to pre-verbal logic and presupposes that the artist can take charge of his or her own libido and transform it in a symbolic statement».
She went on to say that, in her view, this process worked differently for men and for women – that women felt themselves to be naturally divided. Her paintings, therefore, are a form of acting out – dramatisations of aspects of feminine psychology. It is interesting to see how flexible and varied this visual language is. The images do not always rely on the idea of severance or division, though this is undoubtedly prominent in her work.
In Apparizione di signorina, for example, the device she uses is simultaneous simple and subtle. A female figure stands before us – fully clothed but barefoot, arms clasped behind her back. Her gaze is direct and candid, apparently untroubled. She is wearing a modest dress, with a high collar. It is this dress that tells the story. The fabric of her costume somehow insists on revealing every detail of the young woman's sex. In her own mind, this woman may possess many interests and attributes. For others, she is primarily a sexual object.
The symbolic language Gandolfi uses makes use both of figures and of inanimate objects. The inanimate elements are usually deliberately commonplace, but often take on double or triple meanings. An example is the electric cord that appears in Legami eletrizzanti and Elettricità nascosta. In the first of these images, the electric cord, wound round a naked arm, suggests the domestic entanglements that hamper women, and prevent them from exercising their strength and talents to the full. In the second, the meaning is different. The main protagonist is an innocent schoolgirl, portrayed in a way which is reminiscent of old fashioned story books for well brought up middle class children. Above her there appear two sets of bare female arms, manipulating electric cords. The significance seems to be twofold – first, there is the notion that the little girl is a puppet, who is manipulated by adult expectations. Second, there is the idea that she herself already conceals within herself the «electricity» of adulthood – the powerful hidden forces that will shape her character throughout her life.
