Correspondence

PAOLO LEVI, GUIDO CERONETTI, MAX PELLEGRINI, GIANNI VATTIMO

 

At a time when we are enfolded by, or better, allow ourselves to be drawn in by pictorial themes played out on the transient, Max Pellegrini seems more certain than ever of staying in the sphere of his own culture; almost as if wagering on its morality. It is a direction that brings with it a hint of the solitary adventure, because when the point of reference is history, or rather the daily news, the danger likes in the weariness of having to constantly forego the enticements of schematically fossilised methods and the repetition of pre-packaged modules. The costs of the historical memory and, through it, of constantly putting one’s own identity into question, are the pounds of painful flesh put on display, the evocation and representation of experience, but without catharsis and excluding even the sweetness of self pity. Because the historical memory demands rigour and not romantic yielding, it demands self analysis, but rejects intimist withdrawal.

Other friends writing on Pellegrini’s work have already dwelt, and not without reason, on the definition of his pictorial language; to what extent his figuration should have been placed between surrealism and dream narrative. This is certainly a legitimate question, but is wanting in completeness; or better, it is a way of staying only at the threshold of Pellegrini’s pictorial world, beginning once again to use the key to penetrate it. A solely formal discourse, which I think is never truly comprehensive in the reading of an artist, is even more inadequate in this case. Trapped only in syntactic disassembly, one loses the essence of a mental code that awaits only to be linguistically and semantically traced, in that it is explicitly offered for translation thanks to the ‘instructions for use’ provided by the artist himself.

I think the essence of Max Pellegrini’s pictorial narrative is this rare and precious quality of offering himself and meanings to his work, his solidity of reading even the most subtle refinements, his not wanting to ever forego giving the pleasure of reading to the public, his meditating on himself without leaving room for equivocation.

So why reformulate, in the light of who knows what interpretive key, the meaning of a discourse clearly offered by the images themselves and the titles the artist has given them?

As an example we can look at the tetralogy of the “Momenti di luce in piazza” (Moments of Light in the Piazza): morning, day, afternoon, evening, one relates to the other in a precise, temporal and symbolic succession, the female figures always in pairs and complementary (the Mother and Sister of life?), the moments of the day in transparent symbology of life, first birth, then growth by nourishment (the fish as real meat and metaphor of cultural nourishment?), then consciousness through knowledge of one’s own biological self (Ingres’ bathers as picture of an initiatory rite celebrated by the Woman?), and in the end death, an old man coils up into himself as baby.

And over all and behind all, architecture and ruins that, beyond a cultural matrix, suggest a stoic vision, a lay and immanent, classical, Mediterranean, dynamically doubtful religiousness. In a word the stone that retains the traces of man, or historic memory as strict morality, as salvation, as hope in a continuous present. But why, dear Max, did you speak to me of Kafka, to make your anxiety as a man tangible? To understand, all I need is the memory of an ancient Seneca, perhaps hidden behind the broken statues of the trilogy with the wonderful title “Quel che è di Cesare a Cesare” (To Caesar that which is Caesar’s). Your anxiety prowls around the painful castle of our impossible humanism.

Paolo Levi

 

Dear Max,

You remind me of that Arab Spanish philosopher who followed tears because he was unable to ever weep. You say that you never dream, sleeping, and this explains the reckless accumulation of artificial dreams in your rush between images, the incessant abduction you make of dreams dreamt by others and translated into famous figures, places seen and never seen, transient and everyday things, mixing and remixing all in the special and enigmatic discord of dreams. In this way you get to the natural dream, with its characteristic ruins of Babel, through exaggerated artifice, stretching to the point of breaking the thread of the pretext, in a flood of astonishing and monstrous citations. At times you really go too far, forgetting that art is a calculated and constricted dream, guided by a fixed star, not by crazy stars. So my preference is for the more moderate Max, who finds the balance between the freedom of dreams and the measure of vigilant reason, as in that fine nocturnal landscape of avalanches of snow, that very Cremona style Turin doorway, the runaway glass horse (an extraordinary dream), the church of San Secondo incredibly aureolated with pyrotechnic celebrations that will make more than one Turinese bewildered. In general I prefer the smaller sizes. In museums I do not even dare to raise my eyes to paintings half a kilometre long, they frighten me... I am sure that you, a fanatic of Large Sizes, would not hesitate for a moment if you had the right studio, an immense nave, a steel rolling mill. You would work at a boundless easel, all alone, without even the little team of brush workers who the old masters used to enlist to paint the less significant parts, and you would not have peace until you had managed to fill the substantial paintable surface with a single mass of disordered painting in a few hundred citations taken from East and West, of all the dreams that did not come to you in the night, and of which all that remains, to the point of harming you, is an unquenchable thirst. You are attracted by the circle, like Wagner, like Zola, like Howarth: that slow succession of the hours of a day, between gypsies, Roman columns, benefactors and that passage of light that remain oppressive because the mind extracts them from backgrounds of darkness, they are a Tetralogy! And Nordic, and grim, and “rougonmacquartesca”, and dominated by a fixed idea, which does not free the observer, but imperiously asked, knocking at your temples, to be freed, released...

Your life is ordered and sober; the image tousled and transgressive: the unbolting of a blamelessness that has its roots in your Protestant origins, a coming to the surface de profundis, between extensions of coloured ribbons that tangle like pythons around the nudity of the circensian show, of repressed bangs, and also of a distant identity of which existing with its hopeless suffocations is not the mirror. In not making a routine criticism of you, I save you a torment; you will already have known too many of them, you will have to suffer more still, taking your nef des fous, always more crowded, here and there. But certainly, in our ghoulish Turin, you will be understood and seen better than elsewhere. Turin is full of people who follow the dreams they can’t dream, like that philosopher who does not weep tears. There was an idea of exhibiting them at the Lingotto, but then they realised that the space was too small. Your exhibition will attract a good number of these Turinese, and they will look carefully, and not even with much surprise, even if they will not be contented. They will apply to you the now illegible tag of surrealist: every definition always contains something insulting. And if you were then to be a realist, or even a hyperrealist? Enough, enough; those who want to define you don’t like you. But if I have not centred the analysis, please correct me. Now I leave you with a warm greeting. A friendly goodbye.

Guido Ceronetti

 

Dear Gianni,

Although I am not a philosopher I am writing this letter to you, who are, spurred on by the ideas given to me from reading Truth and Method, to which you wrote such a fine introduction (which Gadamer himself cites in the preface to the Italian edition).

Gadamer’s work struck me profoundly with its ability to give a solution to numerous questions regarding my work as a painter, but also others whose easy resolution I had not glimpsed and that I had set aside. It seems to me that Gadamer’s thesis on art, or rather the work of art, is that there is not a preferred method for understanding the work of art, nor is there a preferred method for making it. What counts is its truth. Not the fact that the work of art is the bearer of a truth outside itself, but that the work of art is, in that moment, a truth bearing itself. The work of art becomes truth in its significant “being” as a moment of existence captured in the unique nature and importance of the work in question. It is unique and important, in a given moment, or in memory, both for he who makes it and he who observes it. It is, to use my own term, “full of itself”.

In this sense the work of art is not expended in a pure subjective act, by he who makes it or he who observes it, nor in a given objective fact, rationally able to be pursued using a technique of method, but in an inter-subjective act of communication of the artist with the world and of the world with the artist, or more generally of the work with the world.

This would explain the duration of the artistic message beyond fashions and tastes. The work in itself, in its “being”, and in its wholeness, communicates its truth in the unique nature of the experience that is made of it.

Assuming that I have roughly explained myself and assuming within my philosophical limitations that I have grasped Gadamer’s thesis, then this thesis, ignoring its overall development in relation both to the rational act and to history, has some fundamental consequences for me. I will try to list them in order. In the first place that which I had thought a constituent element of the work of art collapses: the mendacious nature of art itself. The work is no longer something that stands for something else; in the most prosaic instances the artist is not a reproducer of images, but the work stands on its own in its truth. In this sense it is not compared to nature, of which it could be a copy; nor, much less, to a political programme or an ideological view, of which it could be an exemplification. Or better it can be all this, though elevated by being a work of art; something, that is, whose presence and uniqueness, and unity cannot be replaced by another presence and uniqueness (e.g. by a natural landscape and by an ideological text).

So if one repudiates the mendacious nature of the work and highlights rather its truth, as a moment of its being, it seems to me that many prejudices about artistic currents collapse, along with the qualitative distinction between the avant-garde and tradition. Indeed, if a work is qualified by its “being”, as a moment of life caught in its truth and uniqueness, the “right” style for expressing it is of little importance; or better, it is not the style that gives it its being, but the power of the work itself that makes the being of its style (or of its expressive medium: photography, advertising, cinema, painting, literature etc.).

In the second place the view of the work as unique and true seems to me to resolve another question, that of its fullness in its totality. Is the work, I wondered, simply the sum of its constituent parts (e.g. is a painting the sum, the sequence of the paints combined in it) or is it something more? Does the interpretation of a theme (e.g. musical) owe its beauty to the theme or the interpretation? And, finally, is a piece of writing distinguished by the individual ideas and propositions gathered or rather by the overall thesis developed? Here, too, given the starting hypothesis that distinguishes truth from method, it is of little importance to know the mechanisms that make up the truth of a message, it is announced as such, and we grasp it globally, for its “being” that is given to us in the form of a musical piece, a painting, a story etc. Thirdly, still following this thesis, the solution emerged to the problem of professionalism, or of being a professional in art.

My having always been a painter, is the very foundation of my existence, but whose fullness is found in the fullness of my being a man; and so not in my professional specialisation, in itself restrictive, but in the opening up to an understanding of the world. In this sense modern rationalism demands in professional specialisation the truth of the very being of the man, of his being a doctor, for example, or a builder or an architect; but in this way it does not ask him to be an ‘artist’ (even though he can be such in his work). Being an artist does not correspond to a specialised activity, but seems rather to result from the actual activity of he who produces. The expressive experiences (pictorial, literary, scientific etc.) that assume artistic validity then are numerous, and not so much because of the way in which they are proposed, which is also essential for formulating them, but rather because of the truth of which they are the bearers. To be clear, it is not sufficient to be a scientist to produce a universally valid and recognised scientific system, but rather the contrary: usually the person who produces a scientific system, or a theory, can be described as a scientist.

In this way the figure of the professional in art (but also in science, or philosophy) seems to me to collapse, in that there cannot be a professionalism as a “profession of truth”; unless hypothesising one’s own craft as an immediate expression of God - something in any case that is difficult to demonstrate...

It seems to me rather more modestly that what is proposed as a work of art, lasting in time, whose unity and truth can be immediately and intuitively grasped, takes its power not so much from the subjectivity of the artist who produced it (of whom I can not know anything) nor from the society (past, present or future) that receives it; but from the object (e.g. Vermeer’s Lacemaker) in its being in that moment, in its blend of forms and colours (which, if I may say so, “takes my breath away” or “touches me” and so on).

A fourth and last question to which Gadamer’s thesis made me see the solution is the correct placement of criticism in relation to an understanding of the work. If a work - meaning a successful work - is true, the critical contribution becomes important in ordering the facts that can lead to such truth; thus it is not the critic who makes the work of art, but the work that makes the critic, as privileged witness. (Although the being of a work does not in theory have need of privileged witnesses, in that it is the communicative capacity of the work itself that creates its own witnesses; however, it must be recognised that in a non theoretical but practical situation, one who has critical knowledge of the work can help one who is lacking this. Furthermore, after the impact with the work, anyone may wish to put his emotions in order, and the critic can be a good orderer, he can help analyse that which is not easily analysed).

If these are consequences that can be related to Gadamer’s thinking, I think it remains to be understood how it is possible, given the premisses, to establish the ‘right’ procedure of the work for he how does it. If I cannot hope to be helped by an ideology, an audience or a market, and if in a certain sense I am left alone with my creation, this solitude can embrace me and make me incapable of doing that which I had proposed doing (like search for truth).

The practise of solitude then does not disturb, because in being alone one learns to establish finality and (at this point) methods that allow the nothingness placed before our acting to be in some way faced. If it were necessary to identify a method, it seems to me that the best form, working, is that of never lying; at the same time not repudiating anything. Making what is one’s aesthetic aim an ethical principle, the work becomes like a mirror on which one works to extract one’s own image from the being of the world. In this regard Cezanne’s experience seems enlightening to me, or, conversely, Van Gogh’s. The former deduces his being in the world from objective rationalisation of the world itself; the latter takes it from his own madness. Is all this true? I admit that I was stimulated to write to you because of two contrasting feelings. On one hand I was inspired by an extreme presumption and vanity (the presumption of being capable of something that I do not know about and the vanity of being able to discuss it with people who do); on the other a feeling of humility and a desire to subject myself to your criticism, thus accepting adjustments, corrections and advice. I therefore ask that you accept both these feelings and reply as you see fit.

Yours, Max

 

P.S. While we were looking at my pictures I was flattered and intrigued by your comparing them to the poetry of Ezra Pound, a poet of whom furthermore I know very little. I would like to better understand what prompted you to make such an analogy, in that if I were to identify with an author, my entire most intimate being would go to Kafka (in whose writings, and in whose way of life, I find such correspondence as to ask myself what dark

reason there may be for plagiarism!)

 

Dear Max,

It seems to me that in your letter and your painting there are elements that suggest further discussion of essential themes - whose essential nature I gather (ne sutor ultra crepidam!) from my point of view as a philosopher who does not have, and does not pretend to have, specific arguments and tools to critically justify his own pictorial preferences and so is always slightly forced to distort them, marrying them on the level of concepts, which is more familiar to him. For this reason I do not propose making ‘comments’ on your paintings - out of modesty, respect for what you do and an awareness that the art critic has his own language endowed with rules, even if art is not directed solely towards critics. The nod to Pound that struck you in our conversation was an indication of style describing with an emblematic name that which I more and more expect from a poetic, pictorial or musical work (Mahler?): a sense of an indefinite accumulation of materials, symbols, citations and myths capable of making the complex game of breaking through that constitutes truth appear. It is an indication that comes from Heidegger, for whom the theme of authenticity (authentic = eigentlich), so central to Being and Time, in the later works became the theme of Ereignis, of the appropriating event that “authenticates” (link between Er-eignis and eingentlich) bodies in that it makes them be within a fabric of expropriation and transpropriation. All this has meaning only if, with Heidegger, we think of being not as space-time consisting in presence (and the more it is being the more this consisting lasts, through to the limit of the eternal that is, in the presence, and cannot not be), but rather (for a series of valid reasons related to the Heideggerian criticism of metaphysics) as belonging to a network of references that are given only as a fabric of messages, transfers and memories. If a poem and an art of classical intonation easily correspond to an ontology of presence - the perfect conformity of internal and external, content and form, of the Greek statue idealised by Winckelmann and by Hegel - an art and a poetry of the breaking through of the presence in the fabric of transfers, citations and accumulations perhaps corresponds to the ontology of the recollection and the trace (the properly hermeneutic ontology). I expect not so much to be “struck” by poetry and by art as to be recalled to this endless system of transfers; not, rather, to be placed before something that is imposed on me by evidence, roundness, perfection of light etc. I can perhaps start from here to reflect on your reflections on the ideas that, in your work as an artist, come to you from a text that is also a basic point of reference for me, Gadamer’s Truth and Method. Art is thus, as Gadamer teaches, an experience of truth not in the sense of representation or mimesis, but in being itself an event that, appealing to us and producing real effects on us, constitutes, and does not simply depict, truth. I like to summarise Gadamer saying that, to him, art is true experience of truth, in that it is true experience. The work, when it is such, to him represents an authentic experience, like a long journey or a meeting with a decisive person that transforms us. I think that what you say in relation to Gadamer’s thesis can largely be shared. Going beyond that which is explicit in your letter, I think that conceiving the work as itself truth, and not as a sign of another truth - not only the truth of the world that it should represent, but also, possibly, the truth of the culture, the history, the revolution to which it should in some way apply, as in many recent poetics - helped you to reappropriate painting in all its even most immediate aspects, to throw yourself onto the painting as if onto a place of autonomous truth, endowed with its own laws. The painting does not symbolise, it does not represent, it does not refer to history, it is itself a moment full of history; good. It is in precisely this way that Gadamer claims the truth of art beyond the prejudices of modern scientism, which recognises truth only as resulting from the methodical work of science. I point out to you only some problems that I think arise around this method, which basically I accept, of conceiving the truth of art as historical truth, the truth of an event that marks the world and produces real effects (and which, in Gadamer, is modelled on the classical as a concurrence of aesthetic outcome and historical-cultural effectiveness). The problem - and it can also be seen in your painting - is that the work of art always retains a quality of “appearance”. In your paintings you often recount “stories”, you do not just make “history”; you create fabulous atmospheres, you connect remote representative planes, “you play” in some ways, with appearances. The work being given as a “play of mirrors of the world”, to use Heidegger’s expression, seems to remove the peremptory nature of the precise, effective, decisive historical event, which instead seems indispensable to the conception of the work as a true event and, therefore, an event of truth, which you find in Gadamer. In short, in his effort to claim the truth of art, Gadamer conceives the experience of art as an authentic historical experience; but in this way he perhaps risks no longer distinguishing the meeting with the work of art from any other historical meeting. In this perspective, what is the nature of appearance that art nevertheless always brings with it? Gadamer seems (though I am not so sure; if this is not the case, so much the better) too “realistic”, too concerned with freeing art from all the dross of “unreality”, making it (from other points of view, like Lukács or Bloch’s style of utopian Marxism) an event of historical significance (fully, but exclusively). But in our experience the work of art always remains something that does not perfectly coincide with historical experience (confirmed, I think, by your observations on the particular nature of the “unreality” of the artist’s work itself). Indeed, perhaps only because of this (that which Hegel called his being a “Sunday of life” and which has often been branded as aestheticism, by the ‘committed’ of all kind) does it manage, paradoxically, to be to us a real experience of transformation, so an experience of truth. There are many signs in Gadamer’s work suggesting that this aspect of appearance and the “unreality” of the work of art are underrated; for example, as you will remember, all his polemic against the ‘aesthetic conscience’ and the precision, or unhistorical nature of Erlebnis. I, too, was fascinated by this perspective (and this can be seen from my introduction to the Italian translation of Truth and Method). But a subsequent rethinking of Heidegger and the differences that separate Gadamer from him induced me to rediscover precision, ahistoricism and unreality as positive aspects, and the nature of the appearance (also dear to Adorno in his Teoria estetica) of art as a peculiar, paradoxical way in which it exercises its historical “effectiveness”. Heidegger says that the work of art is a “setting up of truth” in that it keeps open a conflict between the “world” and the “earth”; that is, between a visible and evident system of meanings and an obscurity that, I think, refers in the final analysis to mortality. I would translate it like this: the truth of the work is detached from every representative relationship with “reality”, and so it is also the object that, as you say, in its being, in its blend of forms and colours, is imposed (touches, takes the breath away). But I think that it is necessary to be careful not to interpret this experience in an overly classical or historicist way; the work perhaps also “takes the breath away” because it represents an experience of life that goes “against” life in its immediate historical sense; it evokes mortality, it places the real on a horizon of references that is relaxation in infinitum, in the unlimited fabric of appeals, transfers and messages that make up that which we call being. I think that all this not only represents a philosophically more effective way of conceiving the work of art in general (in a sense that corrects some of Gadamer’s possible “realistic” excesses with an appeal to Heidegger); but also helps in reading your painting, which, despite all its tangible evidence and its imaginative charm, is not painting of full presence, in my opinion, but rather of the evocation-summons, and so it calls on an experience of truth as a breaking through rather than a complete and perfect form. With all my admiration and affection, Gianni Vattimo

 

(In exhibition catalogue, Galleria Davico, Turin, May 1985)