Franco Guerzoni. Sipari
The veil of vision
by Giorgio Cortenova
It is difficult to imagine a more vulnerable surface than a theatre curtain and yet, at the same time, one more resistant to transparency, one more austere or more difficult to perforate. Also because this resistance is a two-way process: it works for the public looking at the scene and vice-versa. Our gazes intersect and lose their way within the folds and lacerations in a kind of erotic voyeurism that is placated only when the curtain is drawn and the darkness that prevailed on one side of it takes over our space and the stage lights eliminate any enigmas as they are narrated. And so our gaze goes on stage but leaves behind, for ever, the rite of the icon, that magical archetype in which, in its invisibility, everything is foreseen.
I don't know just to what extent the title of these works by Franco Guerzoni refers to all this, but we do know that the flames lit by poets of the image - poets, that is, of phantoms that do not lend themselves to words - develop by themselves and often contradict their author's first thoughts. So I don't really care. And, what's more, I know about Guerzoni's love of card games, and anyone who has only a minimal experience of them will know that you shiver, not when you first look at the cards you have been dealt, but when you begin to study them, figure after figure, colour after colour, balanced between the visible and the invisible. Once again suspense intensifies our gaze whose realm is that of anticipation.
When it comes down to it, we are suspended, we become a diaphragm between absence, a promise, and an interval. It is here, in this 'veil', that various visual paths cross, establish themselves, and push in both directions: it is in that 'veiling' curtain that silence becomes form and form, in its turn, becomes silence. It is impossible to possess it, and difficult to give it a definite sense or hold it to a stable rhythm anchored in the changes in the direction of the gaze. Anyone who tried would only see the disappearance of the revelatory bubble of art, the unfathomable theatre of the image: the phantom balanced between Eros and Thanatos.
Franco Guerzoni's language has developed along this border between the visible and the invisible, between the attack on the eye and its defeat. But in his career there has never previously been a series of works so revealing as this 'curtain', dropped in order to reflect light and material like the traces of a dialogue between vision and its origins, between the essence of painting and it physical yet symbolic manifestation.
It is probably here that, like an epiphany, he consolidates the secret of his painting, of that ancient and sleepless disease that identifies itself with the enigma. In fact, from the very beginning of his 'abstraction', Guerzoni's art seems tightly bound to the spell of those 'anagrams' so dear to Ferdinand de Saussure. With him the 'signs' of the verse were nothing more than a grid from which flowed the secret meaning of the 'argument': the theme-word, the name of god, evoking the killing of sense. Here, in the neutral 'grid' of a surface monochromatically annulled by voiceless white or black, the final meaning of the picture blossoms: its action as an inexhaustible, aspiring pulsation, like the erotic unveiling of a naked and defenceless body.
The artist acts between the two eternal poles of art: on the one hand the action is under control and the helm forges straight ahead; on the other, reason is often shipwrecked. Of course, there is an inclination to repetition, but then you realise that the polychrome has taken the monochrome by surprise and appears and disappears at the edges of a surface that is no longer unbroken: the terrain has been excavated and the perimeter is torn by unexpected tensions.
And now you no longer question yourself about the traditional flatness of modern abstract painting, about its being objectified within hard edges or soft colours. All this is part of a recent painting tradition. With these planes, so 'irregular' and ruffled by turbulence within the surface itself, you have no choice but to make other connections. Older and familiar allusions are summoned up by Guerzoni's work, from Wiligelmo to the unknown artist of the corbels of Modena cathedral. In other words, in his painting his sources should be looked for further back in time, and nearer in space: perhaps, at the beginning, the principle of the 'threshold' plays a primary part as the confine between the exterior and the interior worlds, a sign of knowledge built up day after day and of a revelatory inspiration outside reason.
In fact what is visible does not stand on one side or other of the curtain: on either side there is only 'appearance', what seems to be but is not. Instead, what counts is the revelatory vision, and this comes about only while waiting, when the path is re-trodden and interior speculations made: in other words, 'suspense' which, in fact, is part of the reality of daily life. Yet if waiting is part of ritual, then Guerzoni's painting itself is, not so much the realisation of a pragmatic and systematic programme, as an unconditioned belief that only through magical evocation can an unfathomable enigma cohabit with daily life and be 'exterminated' and 'killed' in the dust of existence.