|
Distances and silences in Peter Greenaway, painter
It's always a discomfiting decision, when considering a multi-faceted artist, whether or not one should subdivide his fields of interest into separate wedges; to divorce, for instance, the analysis of the paintings on show here from his opus as a whole or to view them as an integral part of it. I will leave the author of nine such important films as The Draughtsman's Contract (1982), Zed and 2 Noughts (1985), The Belly of an Architect (1987), Drowning by Numbers (1988), The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and their Lover (1989), Prospero's Books (1991), The Baby of Mâcon (1993), The Pillow Book (1995), 8 Women and a Half (1999) at the mercy of specialist critics, who, apart from anything else, have already expressed themselves abundantly if inconsistently on each one and I will instead follow the tracks of Greenaway as painter, perhaps (who knows?) impersonated autobiographically by that same Higgins, a draughtsman who, in the England of 1694, is commisioned to reproduce various images of a country estate on twelve pages, rounding off his fee with the favours of the landowner's wife and daughter. From his drawings clues come to light of a crime just commited and the artist finds himself involved in a complex detective story with the burden of the proof his: into a world which would like itself to be crystalline and perfect just like that which Greenaway exposes us to from time to time in his paintings creep doubt and mystery.
In every frame emerge references to 17th century European painting in a kaleidoscope which makes use of the best from many artists; glimpsed here and there in a costume, a hair-style, an interior, an atmosphere: the re-constructions and citations of a devourer of artistic images and of concepts, of ways of life which insinuate themselves into the viewer, actuating a complicity of sympathetic gazes, a passion, a sharing which permits no escape.
Anyone who has no love of "his" (quoted) Painting, which becomes mysterious companion and background and substance and is mingled with eros and thanatos, with sloth and fury, pride and violence, is excluded from the world of a Greenaway who reveals himself as an impassioned frequenter of museums and libraries, of urban areas characterised by ancient architecture as well as the forms of a re-invented archaeology- because, deep inside, possessed by these, but equally as an explorer of that sweet, rustic Nature which is the English country-side.
Not for nothing has he been accused of mannerism and "tight-knittedness", of intellectual exhibitionism, of a virtuosity which smacks of kitsch, of profanation: in reality he is submerged by the story and its forms and with great difficulty wants to emerge from it with paroxysmic scripts which mix at the speed of a centrifuge exaggerated beauty and exasperated ugliness, sweetness and violence, honey and hemlock, the self-evident as well as the utmost refinement.
Instead, in the painting, collages, or drawings of Greenaway there are, as if placated, the imposition of a slow rhythm, a pause for reflection, a slow-motion gesture, a sign - synthetic, modern but not redundant, an investigation into the past and the geometric essence of things, not to mention a "thoroughness" in the colour which would have pleased Newton, Goethe, Itten. It's almost a slow, moderate preparation for the next leap, it's the moment of silence within ourselves before the "tossing and turning", it's the apparently unproductive phase during which the intelligence freely spends itself, it's the obsessive and repetitive control in an idea which will gush forth or retire to its shell or become stronger even while changing direction.
And then, crossing the mind and directing the hand, there are tangles of sensations which slowly sorting themselves out traverse many visual and emotional lands to emerge on canvas or paper, changing technique and instrument, or those which repose, in unconcious recognition, in a beautiful 14th century miniature, on the page of a post-Gütenberg book, in the portrait of a Gainsborough or Vermeer, in the faint but resounding seascapes of a Turner, in the celestial non-compositions of a De Stäel: it's the history of centuries re-introducing itself and looming over us, seductive and frightening, that Greenaway immerses himself in to re-order and render current and tolerable. Consolation and terror, rest and motion, as in "Nativity Star" (1963), where the resemblance to a triptych breaks apart to host the earthly remains of Piero della Francesca, the Star of David, comets and a dense mass of ancient symbols which become coeval because of the fluid brush-strokes which soften the essential harshness and purport.
In "Computer Vocabulary" (1968), on the other hand, we run up against a skein of ink drips almost like vertical burns, peaks like the diagram of a heart which palpitates or is arrested , acid which corrodes, a telluric arrangement. And in that lunette with "Paesaggio stellare" (1968) it's the universe itself which silently teems, while in "Geological Diagram" (1968) the Earth's crust which stratifies, blending the colours of its very essence. Then the world becomes a chess-board in "Gaming Board" (1968), where no-one dares make the first move: sharp red and white geometry and shreds of dust in the collages of 1972, where the colour loads the empty spaces to accelerate their possibility of communication. Old letters and smudges, abstraction and the concrete, words and colour, outlines, urban labyrinths ("The Amsterdam Map" 1978), paper tinted with a wash which spreads uncontrolled and becomes something new in its absorption; cascades, faces, devices, numbers, the stylized forms of a metaphysical mannikin, but also indelible and immutable marks which become a permanent feature, a base scheme without variants to adapt and re-clothe.
And then too, chromatic photograms with faint silhouettes, which foreshadow machine movement and Icarus who plunges into the water like a falling star.
The chilling and unattainable coldness of David, the tonal light of Vermeer, the periwigs of Velasquez, the composed exactitude of Giovanni Bellini, the archaism of Cimabue, right up to Warhol's iteration and Mondrian's geometrics, blend with the personality of the film director and come to the light; the ductile and flexile camera-eye of Greenaway regrouping them in colour, in those tabulations of nuance which combine the white of chalk and gypsum with the black and red of spent or burning coal, with the tones of clays and rusts, endless numbered sequences, put together like rare samples drawn from the surrounding universe, whether already painted or still observable from life.
The notorious Anglo-Saxon aplomb dissolves in him, the fogs thin and the hundred tones of grey of the urban man are spurned to suggest colour as vitality and experience, whether primary colour or industrial mixture, base tone or alchemical combination laid on flat or rivulated to symbolize the house in the water or water in the house (acrylic 1999), founded on an essential geometry, a geometry almost infantile, were it not for those exemplary networks which intersect according to a knowing movement of line and square, as we can observe too in the predisposition of the sequences in "Landscape Game" (1999) where in an interlocking puzzle of near/far, of foregrounds and expanded horizons is portrayed an infinity of suggestions inferred from the study of landscape - a juvenile obsession culled from the Old Masters but also from photography and (obviously) the cinema, without knowing if one is a function of the other or vice-versa. It is a matter of fact that in Greenaway's universe there is a place for everything, as his films reveal - true visual and emotional encyclopedias, storms attractive or repellent, but in any event unplayed hooks that seem to condense in that "Museumplein" (1999) where in a rack his pop symbols are hanging at the four cardinal points, and the museum becomes both lock and life-belt, bolt and safety-pin for yet another century.
His works become notes and notions more abstract than those that even Dario Fo and Fellini (to give an example) put on paper as a first script, a moving screenplay, perhaps the only one to last because primary essence of creativity. Antonioni, on the other hand, has investigated the landscape as a future place, as a fleeting sensation and together as a desire for eternity.
There is a profound gap between the film-director and painter; on the one hand Greenaway tends to add, to multiply, to register chaos and with a modern lexis supported by an ancient filigree, spins the inherent multi-layered Western culture; on the other that which dominates is the division into rigid, scientific structure, in boxes, drawers; a desire for order, classification by number, a grid - a base on which to begin to re-construct knowledge. This is the difficulty of modern man suspended between density and rarefaction, struggling between sensorial and conceptual awareness, between simplicity and redundancy (which his psychological apparatus signals to him), moral capacity, mental equilibrium.
Greenaway represents this archetype and his evolution.
Lucia Fornari Schianchi
Superintendent for the Artistic Heritage
of Parma and Piacenza
|
