LIKE LOST DREAMS

The space in which an exhibition is staged can be regarded by the artist either as a simple container or as a true interlocutor. Between these two options lies a world of difference. In the first case, the author—or authors—showing their works will remain indifferent to the history and the potential resonances of the place. In the second, the works enter into symbiosis with it, imbued with meaning while also bestowing meaning upon the space. Past and present, space and time fuse into a unique whole, capable of absorbing an added value that is anything but guaranteed in art. Naturally, this concerns artists and works that embody art as an integral, passionate experience—not cold and calculating experts of marketing, chasing an opportunity for business.

Vincenzo Scolamiero lives art as such an integral and passionate experience. While respecting it, he is no slave to the market, nor to trends. Rather than following well-trodden paths consolidated by easy consensus, he is the one who points the way. As I have written before, it is a path—or better, a “journey”—whose destination is the whole, totality. An entity disdained by a post-contemporary era that is both atomizing and atomized, producing countless obedient and impotent solitudes. The totality toward which the artist strives is one that makes no distinction between the elegant, refined physical space given to him on the top floor of Villa Helene, in Hendrik C. Andersen’s house-museum, and the history of this visionary sculptor whose presence still pervades the walls and rooms of this unique residence.

This house-museum is a “place crystallized in time,” as Scolamiero himself defines it: fixed in its testimony of an authoritative, sumptuous past, yet magically “open” to interaction with another aesthetic, one that emanates from the painter’s work like enveloping music. I say music advisedly, well aware of how profoundly music inspires and “moves” Vincenzo Scolamiero’s work, for he is truly a theorist of the need to break down the fences separating art, science, anthropology, and life itself. The project for this exhibition dates back two years and endured repeated postponements.

Thus, there was ample time to reflect not only on the architecture of the site and Andersen’s sculptural research, but also on his utopian dream of a world city of arts and sciences—where the intellects of all fields of creation (artistic and otherwise) and knowledge could converge. A project carefully developed and repeatedly presented, though unsuccessfully, to monarchs and heads of state. With an energy and impetus not unlike that which drives our painter, whose entire oeuvre is animated by a panic thrust that engages logos, nature, the poetry of nature, music, and literature: the noble instruments of a process of integral liberation from the malaise of vulgarity and need.

Andersen’s was, therefore, an unrealized project, a lost dream, as so often are the dreams of artists and revolutionaries—leaving behind only the testimony of an effort, of an attempted passage from resigned and passive fragility to rebellious and emancipatory fragility. The city of arts and sciences was never built, yet Andersen—as this magnificent event demonstrates—still speaks to us. Andersen is not dead, just as art does not die, and utopia remains—and must remain—to nourish those who climb toward the sky.

Scolamiero himself recounts how the impressions gathered during his repeated preparatory visits to the museum intertwined with those that, for years, have been stirred in him by the reading and rereading of Georg Büchner’s remarkable novella Lenz: the story of a journey in search of something never to be found, like the “lost dreams” that the protagonist Lenz is condemned to chase forever. Once again, literature and painting enter into dialogue, rejecting the logic of compartmentalization of disciplines and arts—just as Andersen did in seeking his ideal city, while creating the sculptures meant to adorn and exalt the streets of that metropolis that never was.

This time, in the full maturity of his fertile career, the artist has set aside the idea of a conventional wall-mounted exhibition, opting instead for an installation that fits magnificently into the available spaces. These are essentially two. The first, introductory room presents, along its long side, two mirrored blind doors framed in Liberty-style woodwork, within which two splendid vertical canvases have been set. They seem born for this place: perfectly attuned to the context, like chinoiseries that do not deny a decorative intent. A golden ground, pierced by vibrant red that “resounds” as fans open and close, with rhythmic scansions of a painterly gesture at once learned and instinctive.

In the second room, also bare like the first but graced with a Venetian-style terrazzo floor decorated with an ovoidal motif, an installation dominates: four large canvases (140 x 200 cm), arranged in a diamond formation around a central plinth. The supports of the canvases consist of quarry travertine blocks into which iron rods, burnished by the rust of time, are embedded. The four canvases rise like black lacquers populated predominantly with gold, but also with hints of brown and green, feeding into a single flow (like a stream of consciousness) that opens and closes what might appear to be an accordion. At times it frays, climbs, and descends again, like a frenetic journey that never finds rest. There is no repose in Scolamiero’s painting. His anxious search never ceases. And the grandeur lies always, and only, in the journey—not in the destination.

As always in this artist’s work, one is struck by the harmonious relationship between the forms and vortices of a painting that represents the apex of contemporary (apparently) aniconic Italian research, and the relics scattered upon the black central plinth: clods of earth, grape tendrils, tufts of grass, debris, sketches and small unfinished works by Andersen himself. It is nature and the vestiges of an ancient practice that visit and complete the painter’s endeavor. For he is not content to be merely a painter—or rather, he identifies with the idea of the “integral intellectual” painter, one who shuns clever, aestheticizing conceits and instead dares to propose a serious, sustained pursuit of truth.

A truth that may never be attained. And even when attained, it may be falsified, surpassed through non-linear, zigzagging, dialectical paths leading toward new truths—none of them eternal. There are few ontological truths, as one understands in observing the painting of Vincenzo Scolamiero. Among them is Nature, in the Spinozian sense, and—one might add—fragility itself, as a hallmark, a foundational and essential element of the human species.

A fragility that, indifferently, may plunge us into the abyss of mediocrity or into the aesthetic vertigo produced by the painter’s canvases in the eyes of those who know how to see them. It is the idea of a possible movement toward the better—ethical and aesthetic—that Vincenzo Scolamiero’s painting suggests. A movement that cannot be estranged from conflict, nor from the lessons of History, nor from the overarching power of Nature. The same Nature documented by blades of grass, vine shoots, clods of earth, and the traces of human labor and creativity that infiltrate the works of this artist who fears neither Nature nor History.

Roberto Gramiccia