Luca Massimo Barbero

Painting as a visual story "Cinema is the very young heir of two thousand years of European painting. Painting and, I hope, cinema are vehicles of reasoning and philosophical speculations... And, at the end, the expression of pure pleasure before the existence of such objects, such icons" P.G. Luca Pacioli would have difficulty to find a possible polyhedric configuration fit to assemble and contain the prismatic, obsessive and constant activity of Peter Greenaway, not least his painting. Not one of his statements brings the possible issues opened to an unqualified conclusion, nor exhausts the various implications that the very term "painting" contains and evokes. Critics have often been tempted to stigmatize his works by searching for their roots in romantic obsessions, twisted sentiments or gothic-noir distortions, seeking in vain, in my opinion, to unearth from the biography of the author in his beginnings or his past, one root, one reason as provocative as it is justified for such an absorbing and polymorphic world, returning with improbable results. They have turned to his training as visual artist and very young painter in order to analyse his filmography, his citations and references, not to mention the sources of his films. But, apart from the director's comment that: "This is an old and well known story", I believe that it is in fact the continuation of the opening sentence of this brief preface which enables us tollarify how Greenaway loves to collocate the production of his images by stating that: "The cinema is only one particular form of visual expression and is only ninety years old. I would like that the films that I make to be part of the general process of visual expression"[1]. On the contrary, the route that the author takes in orthodox visual art is one which moves backwards, to rediscover on canvas those elements of his figurative curiosity brought to maturity in his film-making and to recognize then come to regard definitively "painting as the supreme art, more interesting than cinema". A linear circle once more, almost at the limits of precisely that paradox around which the world of his "narrative figures" happily revolves. In order to build an exact world of narration, Greenaway's works cannot therefore depart from the position given historically as a delegate of every possible representation to drawing. Drawing to him is the diagrammatical key to thinking; a symbol from which to enter and leave in every direction, including cinema. In a continuous never ending game. Thus, the graphic and painting production of this minds which builds and destroys authentic "encyclopaedias of the image " is intercaced with every possible lucubration, becoming plots and potential frameworks of his own personal figurative world to be narrated through metaphor, allegories which twist and turn the labyrinth of his and now of many of our obsessions. The way is paved notoriously by a particular period of drawings, which although executed by the author appear in one of his films. This peculiarity of the drawings for "The Draughtsman's Contract" means they are rarely exhibited together with the paintings the author re-unites in his anthology. They are the unifying link as well as a successful attempt to get rid of his own training; that "being a painter" conditioned and trained by attending the "School". "I have studied life" the artist recalls "as a landscape artist, my first interest for visual art came to the surface through painting. In England where there is a well established landscape painting tradition, one is under the impression that every square metre of land and every piece of grass have been photographed or painted or sketched, visualised somehow. However, it is precisely owing to the interest in this sense of space that it is extremely difficult to bring this tradition back to life again. My first painting experiments are an attempt to find a new way of considering landscape as architectural landscape. The research goes on and I am sure there is still a long way to go and objectives to be reached, but my first experiments were based on romantic artists such as Veronese who introduced me to the idea of an exceedingly romantic landscape. English painting was subdued by the Italian tradition for a long time and when the first painters like Wilson, for example, tried to portray English landscapes, they saw them through Italian eyes. Even the most famous landscape artist, Turner, saw these English landscapes with Italian eyes"[2]. It is perhaps the possible identification of the "draughtsman's" drawings' author with the hand that sketched them which provides us with a clue to understand those very works, a sort of means necessary to leave behind scholarly painting and academic adventures by turning them, conceptually, into drawings for the film. Greenaway and his "thinking hand" become an integral part of art history through the film plot, so as to exorcise his own story and make a fresh start. With regard to those drawings he points out: "I have taken some liberty both as regards the plot and the historic perspective, because deep at heart, the core of the film shows a great contradiction. In 1698, actually, nobody would have been interested in drawing and being so precise and accurate in his drawing. The most important aspect was, so to say, impression. Landscape artists, working mainly in Holland and in England used to represent reality more or less precisely. The story, the basic idea of the mysteries, is the extreme precision and accuracy of the representational drawings and of landscape interpretation. In this way the main character is destroyed; he is defeated by being too precise. The prerequisite is that one should draw what one sees, not what one knows"[3]. These are the "draughtsman's" themes, which, paradoxically, return to be found a new in Greenaway's paintings; above all the obsession with Vision and the euphoria of recording and defining reality with precision, at the same time going beyond it with artifice. The artist is he who creates the artifice on purpose; he who makes it possible to observe it and underlines the fact that it is public, he who submits it to a public. "I like the personal relationship with the pictorial creation, with what it implies; the absence of collaboration" notes Greenaway, underlining the special nature of painting. For once the director is alone before a work of art, in his studio, away from the set or any collaborator. "Before a painting, as a spectator, one becomes master of his time. One can look at the picture for three seconds or for three hours... I dream of the freedom of the painter and I try to paint as much as I can"[4]. In one particular architectural location, however, Greenaway decided to decline to show his own work, his own paintings, at the Fortuny Palace during the International Biennale Art Exhibition in Venice. - Painting, images, memory: the Alcina Palace. In the afternoon of 9th June 1993 an incalculable multitude of people is gathered around the Fortuny Palace. The square opposite and all the little lanes as far as the eye can see crowded with people waiting to enter the Palace to visit "Watching Waters", Greenaway's exhibition where his painting fuses with the entire exhibition installation and with the Palace adorned to pay homage to the host, Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo, seen as the spirit of electricity and lighting. In what Marco Vallora called "the Alcina Palace"[5], the English director openly revealed to the public his precise seductions, his scientific magic running through the space as if it were a permanent film set, an itinerary between imagination and reality. In some rooms he painted with light, revealing on command, lighting up and then returning to the darkness whence they came. With light, the painter decided where, when and for how long the eye of the spectator could observe and see[6]. Thus opens the series of suspended papers called "Water Papers" of 1974, incunabula saved from the water they came from; the fruits of past knowledge and of an interpretative hypothesis to come. The Water Papers are "a series of fifty pages conceived to pay tribute to the books that drowned in Florence and in Venice, victims of the floods of the Fifties and of the Sixties. Visibly hanging to dry in the light of an artificial sun, these are pages taken from an imaginary illustrated book. They are not really a submarine product; rather they have been produced through repeated dipping. This apocryphal book has no text; still every page can be read, provided it is possible to read it leaving out the words. They are pages full of facts. Like marine breakwaters, lines do not move; colour is diluted and drained by the water current which washes away everything". Water is an unfathomable instrument, a medium beyond control and an eternal symbol; it is linked forever to the destiny of this painter who abandons and keeps artificial pages and pages found, apocryphal books made by himself, both as author and spectator. They feed on water and from water are born also the works entitled "The tides". Again, these are ideal "pages" of books, of manuscripts travelling through time. This page of the series whose numbering and order seem to have escaped, is the first potential declination of the pictorial-graphic grammar of the author. "The tides" come out and are created by the respective floods, literary equitable disasters: The Tempest, Moby Dick and The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner. The drawings dedicated to "Drowning by Numbers" run along like a mural film, schematic and ordered by the grid of their own external boundary. There are almost two hundred "pages" of text and visual references linking the painting of "thought" once again to hypertext, to multiple images. According to the author "it seems that in the universal film-making practice the film is always slave to the text". The works dedicated to "The cistern Conspirators" date back to 1988, the date of the genesis of the film and its subsequent shooting. These are crowded pencil and ink compositions; a perspective itinerary mathematically ordered. The number corresponds to a role, to an image, to the body, going as far as the order of the algebraic grid, symbol this above all of space lived as time. "The pictures hanging from the walls of this room" writes Greenaway "are structural deliberations concerning various aspects of the making of Drowning by Numbers and of other films still to be made. The statute of these paintings is a dual one: they are corollaries to films, but they also have a full autonomy of their own". Starting from the Eighties, in every one of his paintings the primary characteristic of Greenaway's visual production returns and becomes more explicit: a diligent, lucid and ever obsessive attention to structure and composition. The painting whether a corollary to a film, or completely independent from it; is placed and originates from and through a precise structure, a temporal grid defined space by space, rhythmic and narrative at the same time. In this Mondrianic "landscape" a basic symmetry often reigns, a narrative way of advance placed "a priori", when the painter is about to start work, as if it were a preliminary to the actual existence of the subjects, of the "bodies"of the image. If in the film-making activity of the author the symmetric shot is repeated, balanced, dense in meaning and images to highlight a sort of moving stillness which ironically delights in hampering the film's visual dynamism in the paintings of these years, the edges of the paper, of the canvas contain other perimeters, new geometrics which articulate the narration and are crossed by it. In the same way, in order to underline the subtle cinematographic sense at the Fortuny Palace the director decided in favour of timed lighting, thus making certain details emerge from the darkness of each section, paying special attention to "see and show something in a given lapse of time only to finally take it away from such a carefully pursued neutrality which is the destiny of almost every painting". Images are narrated, therefore as is their structural order and the painter has the power and the pleasure to decide what to do with the narration time, individual or simultaneous, with the stillness and the passage of time. In all the architectural and two-dimensional space of his works, Greenaway subdivides, gives rhythm and lays down a real narrative structure arithmetically divided as if the surface was nothing other than a site dedicated to visualisation. This relationship between space and time is the source and inspiration of the works dedicated to the series "The Tulse Luper Suit case" of 1990 and that of the following year "Fifty-five men on Horseback". "They are fifty-five panels" the artist writes with regard to the latter "arranged in five rows of eleven units each, so as to underline the oscillations of three years of courting between an ethylic hedonist and an unhappy horsewoman. Everything is based on ironic horse stories; the demonstration of a narrating structure which proceeds through pictorial representation". In fact, these panels are bound in one single sheet of paper becoming temporal "boxes" crossed by the ghostly shadow of a knight who interrupts with a few diagonal traces the orthodox and parallel rhythm of the regularly orthogonal structure. Greenaway's paintings are deep spaces rendered schematically. Every external limit corresponds to a deeper, more thorough examination; one is never abandoned, always helped by an explanation, a word, figures, numbers, order and rhythm. The painter does not forget saying that: "No director is interested in chaos" and he proceeds, as in the best tradition, in between a grand utopian project and the execution of the project. Every work can be transposed, every painted image belongs to or could materialise through a different physical aspect in a different narrative way. In this respect, Greenaway is the true visionary of painting; not because surreal, on the contrary he is amazingly distant from every trace of surrealism, but he is immersed in a masterly manner in the materialisation of a world both possible and exceedingly profound; similar and very close to the lucid theoretical delirium of the beloved Boullée, an architect who dreamed of being a painter when he was young. As an image architect, a prolific and mature constructor of the structure of every narrative, Greenaway continues his immense collection of paintings; be they Prospero's ironic pages, rich with puns, indecent proverbs and assonances or the abrasion produced by the constant action of the eraser on the painted flesh of "The dead of the Seine"; bodies lying or standing with eyes blinded by graphite, naked to be put on exhibition dead to be filmed, quivering. The immense flow of images is mirrored in an endless flow of words, of texts. In recent works, originating from an important series of the mid-nineties, the silence of the images goes hand in hand with a visual concept dedicated to the glance, both of the spectator and the "portrayed ". The Body, its potential field of surfaces, its functions, seem to pass now through the painting. This is how the series "Audience" was created; to outline, name and catalogue an artificial public dreamed of and real. Regarding the public, the crowd, the author states: "I have been very much interested in crowd scenes in relation to European painting, starting from Bellini to Napoleon's coronation by David, which is a very crowded painting". A crowd of hopeless glances, soldiers' heads and twins' bodies, napes in the dark of a projection room, our own coloured shadows watching one of Greenaway's images, drowning once again in it for an author who "writes and paints on water". Again, a book open on one infinite page of Peter Greenaway's activities; each painting, drawing or image that you will see lives thanks to an artificial light, a lighting source that you will never see. If it is true that images need light more than their own body to exist, Greenaway's paintings refer to their basic assumption according to which: EVERY ONE OF THESE IMAGES IS THE CENTRE OF ALL IMAGES. Luca Massimo Barbero   1 In: G. Bogani, Il cinema di P.G., Nel Corso del tempo, in Segnocinema n°33, 1988 pagg. 4-10. torna su 2 In: L. Figna, Videointervista a P.G., L'ossessione dello spazio, pubblicata in Segnocinema n°33, 1988 pag. 11. torna su 3 Inedito d'intervista senza estremi di riferimento, siglata da P.Z. e G.C. (intervistatori) compiuta nell'anno 1993 depositata in copia presso l'archivio dello scrivente. torna su 4 In: Peter Greenaway, Circuito Cinema, quaderno n° 41, Comune di Venezia editore, a cura di M. Chiarivi, 1991, pag.20. torna su 5 M. Vallora, "dipingere con l'acqua e la luce", in La Stampa, 21 giugno 1993. torna su 6 Tutte le citazioni a seguire, non più segnalate dalla numerazione in nota e fra <<>> sono tratte da materiali inediti della lavorazione e dal catalogo con testo italiano di P.G. Watching Water, a cura di Luca Massimo Barbero, Venezia, Palazzo Fortuny, 12 giugno-12 settembre 1993, electa editore, Milano. torna su