VINCENZO SCOLAMIERO, THE MAP OF DREAMS

Whether painting belongs solely to the realm of space and not also to that of time is a classic—yet still thorny—question of art history and aesthetics, just as inevitable is the constant comparison between image and word. Vincenzo Scolamiero’s painting does not elude the inexhaustible fascination of this confrontation, precisely because it is, and seeks to be, true painting—painting painted, one might almost say with a pleonasm—no longer so obvious in our digital era, which, ironically, threatens to extinguish the very “wisdom of the hand,” as Leroi-Gourhan had forewarned. In truth, all painting by its nature has an icnological dimension before an iconological one: it is a trace, of poiesis before mimesis in the Aristotelian sense—of making rather than merely representing. It is, in short, movement, and movement belongs to time.

Yet here, in what is not a simple display of works but a true installation project, movement unfolds in multiple dimensions. Beginning with that of the viewer, who is called to follow—or retrace—a path, at once spatial and memorial. At the threshold, two panels, almost like Art Nouveau screens, evoke in the incorrupt brilliance of gold the subtle Oriental inspiration of japonisme together with the sinuous elegance of Whistler’s Peacock Room, while resting on sober travertine bases, solid emblems of ancient Rome’s enduring magic. Beyond the threshold, four large canvases confront one another, defining a space that is both new and open, in dialogue with the broader space and time of the museum, the dwelling where Hendrik Andersen nurtured his dream—his utopia of an art that, though self-sufficient, might nevertheless, through beauty, educate and shape a better future and environment. Scolamiero’s installation thus becomes a resonance chamber, capturing echoes that expand the experience of both place and artworks, placing at its center—literally as well as metaphorically—the traces, once again, of an unfinished, ongoing search: natural and artificial relics—a branch, a clod of earth, a tuft of grass—together with fragments of Andersen’s projects preserved in the museum’s archives. Relics or remnants? We cannot know whether they belong to something irretrievably lost or not yet rediscovered, like the time of utopia itself, gazing Janus-like toward both past and future. This, too, is movement.

It is here that Scolamiero’s work aspires to a more intimate consonance with the inspiration of poetry. Like music, poetry exists only in the moment it is given voice, performed; and it is only in the “presence of the voice,” as Paul Zumthor rightly observed, that the text reveals its mouvance, that incessant vibration perceptible only in actual performance. But there is a form of performance—Gadamer was right—that concerns every art, including the visual arts, including painting. And Scolamiero’s painting, in its purest phenomenology, is the visible imprint of a mouvance that is above all corporeal movement: gesture, rhythm, intensity, pause, reprise. Is this not, after all, the very “grain” of poetry? The luminous filaments that flow and bend in unison, fade and then recondense are like the seismography of poetic breath guiding the painter’s hand. To follow the movement here truly means to follow anew. For this continuous, unpredictable motion—this “infinity of small folds and inflections ceaselessly forming and unforming in every direction,” as Gilles Deleuze wrote of a Leibnizian baroque—belongs to body and soul alike: to the figure, to the maker, to the viewer. The work is therefore not mere extension but also duration. And for those who had the privilege—not granted to all—to witness the temporal and material genesis of these paintings, it would have been astonishing to see how that golden magma, now emerging and floating upon a fathomless sea of pitch, first appeared as the faintest ripple across a bright white surface, like barely perceptible waves upon a luminous, diaphanous veil. The artwork is a process, and its movement is metamorphosis, in the most literal sense of the word, though the genetic traces of its passage remain ultimately buried in the inscrutable depths of its making, its facture. A facture so distinctive that the artist was compelled to devise, even to fabricate, his own tools and brushes, compensating for the inadequacy of traditional painter’s instruments.

It is hardly coincidental that Scolamiero has also engaged with the artist’s book, particularly in the form of the leporello, which itself consists of folds and becomes visible, legible only when unfolded before the eyes and hands. Nor is it surprising that he has often collaborated with poets and composers. Movement, pause, silence, reprise, rhythm, figure, performance—these are, after all, the very terms with which we speak of music, poetry, dance, and painting—of art in general.

The evanescent yet visible dreams of Vincenzo Scolamiero are thus like an imaginary “map.” Maps, it is true, sometimes “lie,” as Madame Szymborska’s verses remind us—and one may wager the artist knows them—yet they “unfold a world not of this world.” After all, and here Aristotle may again be summoned, “the task of the poet is not to say what has happened, but what may happen.” Precisely for this reason we still need the dreams of a visionary, and we must not lose them.