Memories and Voices

Drawn from History and Myth

In 1909, Futurist poet and critic Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944) – the leader of the first important twentieth-century art movement in Italy – called the destruction of art museums and the abolition of myth as subject matter. He believed that this would force a break with the past so that Italy could produce significant new work suitable for the modern age. In 1979, seventy years later, critic Achille Bonito Oliva advocated a return to ‘those modes of expression… abandoned earlier’, particularly the use of personal symbols tied to individual history and public symbols. In his book The Italian Trans-avantgarde, published in 1980, Bonito Oliva used the term ‘Trans-avantgarde’ to describe this approach, grouping a number of Italian artists under this banner: Sandro Chia (born 1940), Francesco Clemente (born 1952), Enzo Cuochi (born 1949), Nicola De Maria (born 1954) and Mimmo Paladino (born 1948).

The exposure of these artists to an international audience in the exhibition ‘Aperto 80', held during the Venice Biennale in 1980, strengthened the notion that they were the artistic vanguard for the decade. This ascendancy was confirmed when the Italian artists were included in the prestigious exhibition New Spirit in Painting, held at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in January 1981, and was underscored by the display of figurative painting by a similarly strong German contingent. The exhibition marked a shift from analytical and logical systems of Minimalism and Conceptualism movements characterized by severe abstraction to a painterly and recognizable image. It was apparent, too, that the creative energies of artists, critics and curators in Europe were no longer in thrall to developments in the United States. After 1981, the work of the Italian artists met with increasing international recognition, surpassing even the Futurists in their acceptance abroad. But while the Trans-avantgarde movement was billed as a 1980s phenomenon, Paladino, like most of the group, had been working and exhibiting in Italy throughout the seventies.

Mimmo Paladino was born in 1948 in the small village of Paduli near Benevento in southern Italy. Essentially self-taught as an artist, he did attend an art-oriented high school (Liceo artisco di Benevento) between 1964 and 1968. He spent much of the 1970s drawing, working on the ideas and images that were to carry him through the following decade. Paladino is a fluent draughtsman; in an interview conducted in 1983, he said, ‘I really draw… It is easy for me. In reality, the less struggle there is for me the better I produce. It is not that I have a mentality that preplans, but I feel that drawing is about the impalpable ... transparency. Painting and sculpture are more about materials and densities’. Drawing is at the heart of Paladino's work; it fuels his paintings, prints and sculpture with a succession of ideas.

Images in Paint and Stone

Paladino's drawings generated the figurative elements that began to populate his near-monochromatic paintings of 1978-80. Poeta all'ombra [Poet in the shade], painted in 1979-80, is one of these first mature works. Typically, it is painted in muted colours on three panels, from which sculpted shapes arise like extrusions from the surface, appearing almost as rust or marine encrustations. Culminating Paladino's search for a style valid tor the 1980s, these biomorphic forms emerge as embryonic images from a nebulous, abstract field. The organic structures cling to the periphery of the canvas like incident glimpsed sidelong --- the kind of image that fascinates the eye at the edge of vision but disappears or retreats back to the ordinary under scrutiny. Indeed, it is the equivocal nature of Paladino's Imagery — the shift from the exotic to the mundane — that creates disturbing and transparent. The ambiguous shapes— leaves, shells or masks — serve to hold the

vaporous coloured surface in check, and the three lozenge-shaped forms overhanging the central panel echo the tripartite structure of the painting. These forms suggest leaves that shade the ‘poet’, whose presence is implied by the ear and mouth-like orifices that also appear on the canvas.

In a painting bearing the same name (see Poeta all’ombra, 1980, in Achille Bonito Oliva, The Italian Trans-avantgarde, Giancarlo Politi Editore, Milan, 1980, p97), a tree is depicted, the 'poet' a mask-like face incorporated into the trunk. Speaking about works like these, Paladino has said that he 'doesn’t like the image of the artist, but rather the images of art. It is like comparing the garden to the forest — an art which is hidden. For me art and artists should live in semishadow, not in the limelight as they do today'.

Although he has worked in Milan since 1977, Paladino maintains a studio in Paduli. Indeed, the artist's childhood in southern Italy is the formative influence on his work. Originally a Greek outpost, Benevento became a Roman colony in the third century BC and was variously home to Egyptian, Greco-Roman and Christian ritual and worship. Relics and artefacts remain, never far from everyday life. In Italy, the museum is literally in the street. Paladino readily acknowledges his roots in the traditional agricultural society, with its old legends and tales — 'stories told in and out of schools'.

In the artist's early work the objects, animals and figures are presented as if in a dream, framed by a pervasive stillness, the silence of ruins. By 1981 Paladino's compositions become increasingly dense and active, the elements routinely agitated by provocative contrasts of shape, colour and texture. The figures in these more complex works (and in most of the artist's oeuvre) are disposed in essentially static poses — asleep or meditating — to put them on an equal footing with the symbolic elements as an iconic presence, and to impart a somnolent atmosphere.

Untitled, 1985, a carved limestone figure, lacks such complications, but its simplicity affords a convenient entrée int Paladino's iconography. When Paladino began making sculpture in 1982, he was logically extending the high relief that characterized many of his earlier mixed media works, and literally taking a step out of the picture plane onto the floor.

When originally shown at Sperone Westwater Gallery, New York, in May 1985, Untitled formed part of an installation of six tombstone-like figures, which were positioned as if supplicants or sacrificial victims. The restricted colour— traces of black and red within gashes cut into the stone —combined with the stylization and the starkness of lines evoke archaic Greek or Romanesque statuary. The figure's elongated fingers touch two accoutrements, a horn-shaped vessel worn on a thong and a dog-like creature peering over the left shoulder. Perhaps the horn, symbol of fertility, and the animal familiar are the attributes of a shepherd — a spiritual guardian of mankind merged from Christianity and rural nature worship. Animals often appear in Paladino's work. He does 'not consider them symbols — they are rather constant presences often parallel to or secret to the human presences in the works'. His creatures highlight man's primal instincts and contrast with modern notions of good and evil.

In the more complex painting, Paladino holds tight rein on his palette, emulating the strong contrasts of primitive or folk art in his use of black, white, earth tones, and basic primary colours. Typically, colour is subservient to the graphic exchange between the signs and images he describes.

The cruciform relief within the regular shape of Scorticato is a vivid demonstration of Paladino's willingness to experiment with the format of his work. He often uses the triptych (as in Poeta all'ombra) or tondo (as in the National Gallery of Victoria's painting Scorticato, 1983), delighting in their archaic and traditional resonance and in the challenge they present to composition. His use of encaustic and mosaic — old-fashioned mediums — also reflects this predilection for combining and contrasting the new with the old. Martyrdom and sacrifice are implicit in the title Scorticato, which refers in Greek legend to the punishment inflicted on Marsyas for daring to compete musically with the god Apollo, and in Christian history to the martyrdom of saints. In this work Paladino refers to Saint Bartholomew, who was flayed in Armenia. His relics were transported in AD 839 to Benevento, close to the artist's birthplace. At the top centre of the painting Paladino quotes Michelangelo's Last Judgement, 1536-41, depicting the limp, flayed skin that in the mural is held by Saint Bartholomew. The traditional interpretation of the sagging hide — which can be applied to Paladino's image as well as to that of Michelangelo — is a self-portrait of the artist 'flayed' by his critics.

The painting suggests an altar laid with candlesticks and conical vessels, but equally the white marble sarcophagus that houses the saint's bones in Benevento. The painted sticks reinforce the notion of an ossuary. Centrally placed in a coffin or bed is a corpse or sleeper, flanked by an animal and a human head, an expression of our dual nature. The upraised hand bears the stigmata, again symbolic of the persecution of those (painter, poets or prophets) with secret knowledge. Behind the sleeper stands a shadowy figure, in front is a head, the three flowing into each other: a mystic trinity. Deep gouges form the mouth of the rugged head, surely representing a poet or an oracle, poised to offer madness or revelation if an ear is pressed close enough. Paladino's works position themselves as allegory, a poetry of images that mysteriously connect a legacy of buried memories and immediate sensation. But like the mouth in the painting, the artist is mute when questioned about the meaning of these dramas. He prefers a free interaction between the content and meaning in the mind of each viewer. Each work is in fact a spontaneous manifestation — Paladino draws from the heart without premeditated plan or studies, adjusting the composition as he paints.

Past and Present in Prints

Paladino's aptitude for image making is propelled by his fluent linear style, which naturally lends itself to printmaking. Ho began making prints in Now York in 1980 at the invitation of gallery owner Marian Goodman, who first showed his work in the United States. He worked initially with one of the best known American printers, Aeropress, using a fairly predictable technique for a novice, etching. Those first etchings, however, were far from conventional. Paladino was willing to break the rules from the start. Tho full range of intaglio techniques — soft ground, aquatint, drypoint, sugarlift, spit-bite — was tested, and sometimes combined with collage.

Pietra di Pietro [Stone of Peter], 1980, shows a figure and a falling animal, the shape of the red animal playfully determined by the fluidity of the acid used to mark the plate. The opposite side of the plate was cut away to give the print an embossed, flowing edge. Chine collé — the use of a thin paper collaged to the primary support — gives a coloured plate tone to Fantasma [Phantom], 1980, and becomes an active element in the composition — as a field or mat — in Con musica [With music], 1980. Tra gli ulivi [Among the olive trees], 1984, printed at Harlan and Weaver Intaglio, New York, and perhaps one of the artist's most striking prints, takes full advantage of chine collé, printing the face and hands of the figure through cutouts in the buff-coloured collage. A border of symbolic imagery rendered in painterly aquatint frames the composition, simultaneously breaking away from the restraining edge of the plate.

In other early prints, Guardar misteri [To look at mysteries], 1982, for example, Paladino daringly combines etching with colour linocut, contrasting the delicacy and fluidity of one method with the raw strength of the other. The balancing of colour against black and white, line against flat areas, printed surface against unprinted paper, is built in to all Paladino's prints. They tend to clearer, simpler compositions than the paintings, but carry the same chthonic subject matter. As in the paintings, little background detail is provided to anchor the figures to a time or place, so they float like the fragments of a dream, open to interpretation. While allied to his paintings, the prints are autonomous, built around the unique qualities of the medium.

Since 1984 Paladino has worked with printer Giorgio Upiglio at Graphica Uno, Milan. He has shown increasing confidence in his printmaking, adding woodcut, lithography and screenprinting (often in combination) to his repertoire, and working on a larger scale. The triptych Sirene, vespero, poeta occidentale [Sirens, evening, Western poet], 1986, is a particularly ambitious print. Powerful images like the antlered head and horse in the left-hand panel — as directly rendered as the prehistoric drawings on the cave walls at Lascaux in France — are called into play. Paladino pits ancient and Christian symbols against each other in a contemporary mix, confident that their access to spiritual resonance will still hold strong, mocking our easy belief in a uniquely modern culture. His compression of past and present is paralleled by an eerie combination of life and death meanings. Etched on iron rather than the more usual zinc or copper plate, the coarse grain in this print provides both a textured tone and the deep blacks appropriate to its large size.

In Lacrimose [Tearful], a portfolio of prints made in 1986, Paladino uses geometric shapes to intervene in the dialogue between figurative images. This device is characteristic of the pictorial eclecticism of the 1980s: 'l can simultaneously take up a relationship in my pictures to Matisse and Malevich without there being a relationship between them', the artist claimed in 1985. The series is a recapitulation of his concerns, and in some ways — particularly in the emphatically geometric core — a portent for future directions. Atlantico [Atlantic], 1987, a mural-sized print made up of seven panels, seems to mark this change. The allusive imagery here is carefully orchestrated on a grand scale, making references to death, birth, art and spirituality. The effect is somewhat graver than previous works, resulting perhaps from the starkness and austerity of the white on black linocut technique and the analytical quality of the piece.

Meaning and Belief

Paladino's work since 1987 is distinctive in its sparseness and rigour. Broad uninflected areas of colour have begun to replace expressionistic marks, and the spare use of imagery makes the abstraction that has always underpinned his work seem increasingly important. Such work, however, is outside the scope of this exhibition.

The 1980s witnessed a revival of interest in meaning and belief in art at a time when the modernist tradition seemed empty. Paladino draws on his rich cultural legacy — myth, legend and folk tales, joined with compatible art historical styles and images — to lend depth and reference to his art. His themes of death and decay mirror a world suddenly aware that the benefits of scientific progress are no longer axiomatic. Paladino's primitivistic symbols tap the residual mythologies of Western civilization to present anew the eternal mysteries of humanity. Paladino offers us images of dread and longing.

Michael Desmond