The Figures Stares into the Vacuum of Their Silence

LAURA MATTIOLI

 

In 1797 Francisco Goya produced the famous etched and aquatinted image titled “The dream of reason generates monsters” (El sueño de la razón produce monstruos), which he was to publish two years later as number forty-three of his series of engravings “The Caprices” (Los caprichos). There are three manuscripts of the period referring to this work. The first, written by Goya and held in the Prado Museum, contains the words: “Fantasy without reason generates impossible monsters: united to reason it is mother of the arts and origin of wonders” (La fantasía abandonada de la razon produce monstruos imposibles: unida con ella es madre de las artes y origen de las maravillas). Another manuscript, anonymous and held at the Biblioteca Nacional de España, says: “Cover of this work: when men do not listen to the cry of reason, everything is turned into vision” (Portada para esta obra: cuando los hombres no oyen el grito de la razón, todo se vuelve visiones).

This engraving by Goya seems to have two meanings: one political, which refers to Enlightenment philosophy and the atrocities committed during the French Revolution, particularly in the years of the “Terror” (1793-1794); and one more personal, relating to the illness that struck the artist in November 1792 and left him deaf and afflicted by tinnitus for the rest of his life, also causing him problems of balance for some years.

The physical disturbances thus became a mental state for the painter, in which the creativity nourished by fantasy had to be ruled by reason while the dreams had to be turned into images with which to coexist rather than nightmares to succumb to.

The word “reason” used by Goya has an equivalent in the Greek term Logos, used by the Apostle John in the prologue to his Gospel referring to the incarnation of Christ: Christ is the Logos, the first rational, mathematic and harmonious generator of all things - from the stars in the sky to the tiniest creatures, from galaxies to sub-atomic particles - which is identified with God himself. The Logos is the Word of God incarnate in Christ, capable of being for man not only the first beginning of life, but also the final end, all brought together in redemption.

The state of silence, like that experienced by the deaf person, thus metaphorically becomes the “silence of God”. The continuous search for God and the transcendent through art (of which Max Pellegrini speaks in his interview with Antonio Monda of 2014) never finds an answer because human reason is unable to comprehend the Logos in its entirety: it is soon lost in the meanderings of the mind’s lucubrations, where dream and reality merge in the effort to perceive.

In his 1982 book The Image and the Eye. Further Studies in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, Ernst H. J. Gombrich shows, in the chapter on the relationship between word and image, how visual and verbal language cannot be translated into one another. Indeed, no verbal description of an object, place or colour, no matter how accurate, can ever precisely communicate all the detail contained in an image of the same object, place or colour, just as no image can ever be inflected according to the temporal succession of verbs, such as the past, the present perfect or the future, but only in the reality of the present.

Painting has tried over the centuries to obviate this to communicate a narrative, or succession of events, mainly in two ways: with a sequence of images or scenes connected paratactically, one beside the other following the usual direction of reading, or by the syntax of a main scene in the foreground, to which the secondary scenes are subordinate, represented chronologically before or after in the background.

The most recent neuroscientific research has led to a much more substantial and detailed knowledge of how the human brain works, of how it is modified by the various kinds of perception and how the latter interact with one another.

Without going into specific details, it may be said that we now know with certainty that the experiences undergone, especially at an early age, and the resultant learning (such as for example learning to play a stringed instrument as a child) modify the structure of every individual’s brain and make it unique. The presence or lack of stimuli provided by the five senses is decisive for the configuration taken on by the brain. Indeed, the learning resulting from the stimuli themselves reinforces the connection between the neurons.

The sensation formed by the reception of visual stimulus is processed by the brain on the basis of what is also apprehended by all the other senses, giving rise to perception. The latter is the basis of our ability to interact with the outside world, and to represent it.

Sight is fundamental for recognising the objects around us and placing them in space, so we can orient ourselves and use them to our advantage and without danger, but from a neurophysiological point of view, seeing is a complex act. Indeed, a direct stimulus interacts with our memory of all the stimuli received previously by all the organs of sense, first of all touch. For example, sight is able to recognise the rough surface of an object not only by the presence of colour variations on the surface due to the play of light and shade, but also by the memory of the tactile perception of a similar surface experienced before.

The reason figurative art, and portraiture in particular, is able to have such a profound impact on us is due to the fact that our brain is naturally structured like an incredibly powerful computer in order to be able to process scenes and recognise objects, particularly faces and facial expressions. Indeed, it is fundamental for our survival to be able to move safely through the space around us, to distinguish objects, animals and human beings, useful friends or dangerous enemies.

This is why the inferior temporal cortex in our brain, which contains regions specialising in the processing of visual stimuli related to colour, faces and their expressions, is in direct contact with the hippocampus, the seat of memory, and the amygdala, where emotions are processed. The close relations between the inferior temporal cortex, the hippocampus and the amygdala are thus the basis of our capacity for recognition and so of our reactions to the environment around us and people, but also to images and art, figurative or not.

I hope that these considerations may help make us more aware before Max Pellegrini’s paintings. He became hard of hearing at the age of two and a half, then completely deaf at an older age and has now recovered his hearing thanks to a recent, audacious surgical operation that connected his brain directly to an acoustic prosthesis.

Pellegrini’s paintings are always large, so as to create a one to one relationship with the artist and the observer. They are thus placed in space as the alter-ego of the physical person.

They are figurative paintings, in which the faces and figures are always clearly recognisable. Faces and figures are key references in the perception of a deaf person, who needs to “see the other”, not being able to perceive its presence by sounds when it goes out of his field of vision.

Colour has a fundamental role in his paintings because, lacking aural stimuli, his visual and particularly chromatic stimuli are more developed, connecting to a greater emotional sensitivity to these.

This type of compensation is natural. The musical aptitudes developed by the blind or visually impaired are fairly common and I have been able to personally verify as a teacher that people endowed with a better musical ear generally have a fairly poor aptitude for visual observation.

So it is no surprise that Pellegrini has remained so faithful to painting and in particular to figurative painting, albeit of a genre that cannot be called realistic.

Although having made his artistic debut in a Turin permeated by highly innovative stimuli, in which an interest grew in avowedly conceptual approaches and a fairly traditional use of expressive materials, he continued his solitary creative process very consistently, more attentive to his interior voices (the “dreams” as he likes to define them) than the research of his friends and contemporaries, defined by the term “Arte Povera”.

His travelling companions have been the great Italian artists of the past, as is natural in a country that has produced the bulk of artistic artefacts in the modern age. Over time he has developed a silent dialogue with them of careful observation, reappraisal and frequent citation in his works. His recurring subjects include religious images, which typify most of the early art of our country. He reformulates them to revive the dialogue with an iconography important not only in art, but in the entire history of the culture, in search of the solid signs of a Logos that he tries to perceive beyond the visible reality.

Regarding contemporary art, Pellegrini has focused his attention on the creative process of painted images taken from photographs invented by Andy Warhol and carried on also in Turin by artists like Giulio Paolini. The use of this photographic-painting technique has allowed him since the start of his work to develop a “reductionist” process of the figurative image similar to that of Warhol and Alex Katz. Reducing the number of details, renouncing chiaroscuro in favour of flat tones and abolishing the perspective of Renaissance origin, Pellegrini manages to put order into the overlapping of his “dreams”. He takes all the images back to the solidity of the present and at the same time alludes to a complex reality that transcends the visible world.

In 2014 Danilo Eccher noted the presence of a horror vacui in many of Pellegrini’s canvases, which emphasises their two dimensional nature. He referred this to the influence of the Viennese Secession artists and post-Impressionists like Eduard Vuillard. I think that the way in which Pellegrini covers the canvas with colour and signs may be added to Eccher’s stylistic reflections. This is also a consequence of the jumbling and overlaying of figurations in the artist’s mind, overwhelmed by the stimuli of the current “image society” to which he is particularly sensitive for physiological reasons. Such layering seems to have a precedent in the “Trasparences” produced by Francis Picabia in the second half of the 1920s in Surrealist Paris and against which Pellegrini measures himself in search of a rational order.

As in much Surrealist art, Pellegrini’s figures do not act and, especially, do not interact. They stare, mute, into the vacuum of their silence, enigmatic and alone like the artist’s own experience.