Enzo Bilardello

Vincenzo Scolamiero Evolved

How long does it take to execute a painting, in material terms? Giorgio Vasari observed that the painters of the fifteenth century (for him, the ancients), with their tempera technique—mostly on panel—might take years to complete a work whose conception and composition had likely been rapid, whereas the moderns dispatched works of enormous scale and complex elaboration in a few months.
The mind runs at once to the catastrophic Salone dei Cento Giorni (1546) at Rome’s Cancelleria which, though betraying a plethora of assistants driven like forced laborers, nevertheless bears his name and, together with the frescoed cupola of Santa Maria del Fiore, constitutes the definitive ball and chain on the painter’s posthumous reputation.
Obviously, execution time—as duration—does not count. Federico Barocci could take ten years or more to deliver a commissioned work—and heaven help anyone who rushed him—he who, after the poisoning that nearly killed him and marked the rest of his life, could not work more than two hours a day.
More than time, what matters are inspiration, identification, technical mastery, the capacity to contradict oneself and start again from zero—or almost—as the extraordinary late turns of Titian and Monet attest, to name but two that have never dimmed.

All the more so when I turn to consider an abstract work of art and ask myself how long it took to produce this or that image with its complex device—often without a center and without organic structuring—apparently the fruit of a lightning impromptu, realized in the space of a sigh.
When I once asked Vasco Bendini (1922–2015) how long it had taken him to paint certain large canvases that seemed as vast as Tiepolo frescoes, his surprising reply was: “no more than half an hour.”
And in this reckoning of time—which is obviously no contest—even faster appeared Mikail Koulakov (1933–2015), who, to the same question, answered: “about ten minutes, at most a quarter of an hour.”
Most of the time is spent in preliminaries, in meditation, in identifying a form that is primordial to each work, with the drastic abolition of sedimented history.
The more genuine this inner elaboration, the swifter the making: free of hesitation, repentance, or revisions.

I am reminded of the famous lawsuit brought against Whistler, who, to the judge’s objection—“You are asking 300 guineas for a day’s work?”—answered: “No, for the knowledge of a lifetime.”
Since nothing is more deceptive than epidermal sensation, and the artwork is an enigma that does not yield easily, when I first found myself before a substantial number of paintings by Howard Hodgkin (1932–2017)—small, perfectly interlocked, and apparently executed at a single go—at the usual question I was told: “They took me months, and some I left to be resumed after a long time, changing them completely.”
I conceded the point. Execution time must be excluded from critical judgment and matters only in the generative process the artist sets in motion up to the moment when the work is finished and delivered to the public.
From that point on, even the artist becomes a spectator and can no longer reenter the creative dynamic: what’s done is done.

This long preamble serves to attune me to Vincenzo Scolamiero’s latest exhibition, made up of a few paintings on canvas and paper, of surpassing finesse, but above all of a staggering authenticity—so intense as to overpower and muzzle the discipline of craft, which is abundant.
First of all, these are works “in black,” to evoke a writer—Marguerite Yourcenar (1903–1987)—who forty years ago was indispensable. Not since the time of a “black” painting by Ad Reinhardt (1913–1967), shown at the Marlborough Gallery (I think already renamed L’Isola), priced at seven million lire (which I did not have), has a painting predicated on black impressed me so deeply.
Scolamiero’s black, however, is agitated by tempestuous superimpositions of gold that pitch their camp with supreme freedom across the continuous weave—and here another long digression is in order.

Medieval painting, up to a certain point in the Renaissance, employed gold as a ground to signify an indefinite depth, even a metaphysical one. Later, gold became a status symbol—what made a painting expensive without recourse to philosophoumena such as infinity, the joyous, “sunny” atmosphere, as people now say of those whose passing is regretted.
Add to this the vulgarity of parvenu popes: in 1482 Sixtus IV decreed a prize for the best fresco in the Sistine Chapel, and the winner was the weakest painter of all, Cosimo Rosselli, who had not stinted on gold applied over the fresco’s variegated chroma, which thus became commonplace.
Having gotten the message, Pinturicchio in the Borgia Apartments (1492–94) went to town with the rediscovered device, and throughout his career his success was entrusted to an excess of gold rather than to achieving, at its best, Alberti’s recipe (1435) of invention, drawing, composition, and color.
Given the distorted use to which it was put, it is no surprise that the great artists employed gold sparingly, confining it to details such as the gleam of jewelry.
We would have to wait for the aforementioned Whistler (1834–1903) to see gold properly used again in his Nocturnes set on black or blue. After him, Gustav Klimt (1862–1918) did not hesitate to make intensive use of it, reviving the splendors of painting—and above all of Byzantine mosaics.
If one is in love, as in the case of Oskar Zwintscher (1870–1916), then we arrive at a painting entitled Gold and Mother-of-Pearl (1909), with the implication that the body of the nude model—his wife—is more precious (though not more radiant, indeed tending to darken) than the objects worn or placed beside her figure.

With Scolamiero we are faced with a different use: gold encamps, courses, emerges, and sinks across the entire surface of the painting with a rapid movement, as if driven by an overwhelming kinetic force.
Yet to me, rather than sliding over the black surface of the canvas, the golden irruptions seem to rise from the depths of an almost unfathomable density.
If the golden matter has entirely freed itself from the dark vortex, it then streaks across the surface in fine filaments of complete brilliance; otherwise the golden color—which is not gold leaf but probably orpiment applied with a brush—structures itself like an orogenesis, a mineral sediment visibly struggling to free itself from the black placenta in order to fully realize itself.
Though the painting is entirely bidimensional, the interpenetration of strata is evident: on one side absolute black; on the other uncontaminated gold; and between them a coplanarity and opposition of aureate stratifications that strive to emerge while a black tends to reabsorb whatever would escape its magnetism and density. Before our eyes a tight dialectic takes shape, a cosmic drama without figures and without historia.
This painting makes me think of what occurred somewhat after the Big Bang—the billionth of a billionth of a second—when the darkness, a single whole of matter and enveloping space, loosened its meshes and let the first light show through: the first uneven glimmer—here still mixed with black, elsewhere already powerful and energetic like lightning.

Allow me a parallel—only in procedure—between Michelangelo’s early Battle of the Centaurs and Lapiths (1492) and Scolamiero’s Come sogni perduti (2023) at the height of his maturity.
In Michelangelo’s relief, about the size of a salon picture, what strikes one at first glance is the three-dimensional swagger of those heroic bodies locked in furious combat—the part, shall we say, “in the light.” Only with a little attention do we realize that almost all the bodies are not fully formed and even sink into the mire. The relief rises from undifferentiated matter and in several places has not yet freed itself of it.
The black chosen by Vincenzo Scolamiero not only serves to determine a compact, static surface upon which the rabid (“O rabido ventare di scirocco,” Montale) and rapacious aureate formations deposit themselves to create the pictorial narrative: it is a black with its own thickness, density, infinity.
It is a kind of Leviathan seeing its prey slip away and trying to reabsorb it by the sheer power of its being. Hence a dialectic arises between figures and their existential negation—a force rare in the hurly-burly of contemporary painting.

Scolamiero’s imaginary has roots and a nature altogether different from the ancient lesson of Michelangelo, yet this Herculean effort to emerge from a uniform, compact, infinitely dense black is analogous and responds well to contemporary cosmogony, which already has its metaphors and allegories. Moreover, it is not only thought—an interrogation of the unconscious—but also a reification of the dream, rendered in terms that are powerfully and elegantly painterly; and for this I believe contemporary society owes him something. I would call it gratitude.

Enzo Bilardello
29 February 2024