Main menu:
______________________________________________________________________________________________
Text
[ DE ] [ EN ] [ IT ]
PAINTING. SOUND, GESTURE, SIGN
Francesco Gallo Mazzeo
Equilibrium has always existed only in the briefest moment, merely a full stop, or comma, a suspension, longer or shorter, with a discourse that opens up to all possibilities, the smallest thing will reveal it in conversation and becomes a passage, a crossroads, maintained by small and large gestures, more or less in balance, like that fateful moment, the fiat of mobile immobility, that transfer of stillness into movement and movement, returning, into stillness, inside a system founded upon dialectical space and time, dynamic. Stefan Anton Reck expresses himself using a system made of enigmatic signals produced from a range of fluid marks placed in all directions, they seem to obey an internal mechanism which is inaudible and indescribable due to the depth sound that they carry, the depth of words they carry, existing as a total panic, the daughter of engulfing poetry, made from movements suspended in the air, like sudden blows paused in a stillness that is their perfect medium, being, as it is, weightless and meaningless, the stillness is neat and clear enough to ensure that the marks are bound, whilst expanding on the canvas which forms the perimeter of the infinite.
Sound is what you experience, this is what you share with your friends, it’s enriching, offers company as it follows and defines itself through melodies and discordance, as it is generated by the complex machinations of strings, percussion, wind, keyboards, that which come from an ancient production and that, in time, have been modified and adapted. These sounds sit alongside those which, more recently, have appeared suddenly, born from technological change and the virtual.
These two technologies oscillate between rejection, confrontation and integration, in a game that has many rules which, despite their constant multiplication, seem not to matter, to be rules disregarded, like those rules of modernity, both classic modernity and liquid, which is closer to us simply because we have become used to it through a sort of double service, both a positive one which stretches the space and perimeter continuously and the other, a negative, which pushes the need for newness to an obsession. These works are those of a middling modernity that lies close to us, like the form and contents of lives signalled in the future, in research and in experimentations, the esse nosse posse, in a triad of anthropology, invention and discovery. In the sound, one can recognise the universe, from the earliest moments of its life, of its very existence, but also from the air displaced by the notes of the flute, the voice of a tenor or the feeble sounds of a penitent man. The sound we hear here seems so close to noise and in this lies its beauty; it fits the sense of time and space, the narration of events and the poetry of the intimate which is audible until, conversely, it reaches the internal monologue which is silent.
Comedy, or that which swerves stillness and immobility, is a portrait from every angle whilst remaining immobile and rooted in a glanced identity, a gesture, place, with a journey, a continuum, that passes from one moment to the other, not always in a logical manner, in fact, often, with the negation which is made from different intersections, different affirmations and negations that knot together, and to undo the knot is, in itself, the enigma, the labyrinth that has not yet been formed but forms in front of the viewer, it stretches, expands, flattens, assuming a soft appearance that remains abstract. For many people, on encountering this, they recognise themselves or, without detailed analysis, distance themselves with an intuitive ability to follow their own footstep back to that which is yet to come, without indicating direction, places or even the goals to be achieved, because this is what that form of logic requires – an illogical thought reminiscent of a sudden rain of events, a cluster, chaos. These illogical events hold the potential of abstraction of which the music is the true teacher, for music represents the biological life force in its body, in its evanescence, its vagueness, it allows others to traverse it whilst simultaneously acting as an impenetrable wall, with all the variations that it allows, almost to infinity, as much as this terminus is indefinable and unpredictable. So, with a chromatic heart, music turns to an evanescence of the senses, meanings, contents, all of them formed in the air as proof that there is no structural abstraction that, after anxious loops and turns, doesn’t result in theatricality.
Idioma, like vitality, is the uncontrollable genius that has been captured by the Dionysian dance, led by lust, that which is born from an Eros strong in his essence, who cannot mean brevity or poverty but exactly the inverse, who lives fully, in a place where one may not follow rules as the rules have become visible, stains, transparencies, that weren’t there before, bringing truth to Paul Klee’s prophecies of the continued epiphany built on Leonardo’s sun drenched intuition of the being of art and painting lying in the mind. Language is spoken so that the choir can sing, so that it can be heard loud and clear, as loud, even, as the cacophony of silence that is the son of Pan and everything that came before the orgiastic storm, the coil of wire and signs, so that time can’t chip it or ruin it, so that the moirai can’t cut it, like the poetry of Sappho, like the song of Medea, the tricks of Apollo and Zeus. Language is feared because it is magnificent, without a perverse humility, as rich as the giving aristocracy who give everything as if a party in which everything must be given and in this giving, even triumph itself must be given, that order which means that everything must become sublime, one in all, and decides the fate of physicality, finally free. It is this that is the code that constantly gets lost through its own act of losing itself, and then finds itself in its dreams like a poem that abandons its pages one after another only to recombine itself, piece by piece, orderless, in clinamen which sings of eternal destiny and a madness that makes many lives from one life, a change.
Gesture follows gesture, as if possessed by the need to follow, a rapturous woven process of creation although it is always ontologically dialectical, both being and non-
Teather signifies theories and strategic moves which make up a complex of rules, but also inspiration, improvisation, variation, touch, deviation from the template, lirium and delirium, delirium in the etymological sense, that doesn’t necessarily mean madness or loss of self but the fortification of one’s expressive capabilities, which are the result of many linguistic components, in a quid that resembles only itself, despite having a reflective value that links it to other words and references that emerge from other grammars and other syntaxes which follow and are followed. A metaphor could be that of Meditation on a Hobby Horse of Šklovskij, that represents a form of deviation that offers victory to the ordinary and the mundane, which never loses importance and can suggest the story, while the meditation solves the factor of l’ics. The rupture of the story, the introduction of the absurd, of the imbalance leads to the creation of the myth, millennia past, in all its permutations, multiplications and cultural differences which have made it into an encyclopaedia of the dawn of thought before the appearance of logic. Along with it came a representation which, in fact, is a presentation of the new, of difference, which is born from a heady mixture of joy and sorrow and which is always present in the creative labour and that must pass through narrow ways which make the hand uncertain as it meets rapids that rush it here and there in an attempt to get to moments of fluidity, where everything aspires to movement and to occupying new space which acts as the blank map of fantasy, space undiscovered, waiting for movement.
Absurdum is a Latin word that renders the meaning clearer than the equivalent in Italian or any other language, in Latin it is more philosophical and even theological, but nowadays it is used in a genealogical sense and, sometimes, an ontological sense, like in the antithesis of science that expands everywhere and wants to dictate move of our will. Everything should be mechanic, logical, understood while Art behaves by moving itself onto an exchange that becomes a panorama of its own kind, a movement of the immobile that reincarnates in the pictorial space, in the colours themselves which act as the medium for an exceptional synchrony of everything in one, as everything stills its movement and offers advice like an hermaphroditic psychology which examines that which is not there, that which is not seen, but is kept in the depths like the box containing Pandora’s wind. Convergence is the exit from the images, both real and metaphorical, abstractly and informally, which emulates the past materials contained in the work of artists like Scialoja, Scordia, Capogrossi, Turcato, Dorazio, Vedova, even Kandinskij, Malevic and Mirò, all in a tall temple, near and far, which everyone needs because poetry and speech emanate from it and they, leaving this temple, going from identification to removal still stay between potentiality, possibility and implementation. The sign of absurdum is always thick and dense, with an endemic and structural affinity with the known and directed musical score, such as is the cycle Notations that Stefan Anton Reck had dedicated to Pierre Boulez, with a contemplative and virtuous glance, micro moments and macro moments, a creation of signs and dynamics, that starts at the minimalia and arrives at an inexplicably complex exchange of mysteries.
Style must be made plural because it is appropriate to our age which has been made of thousands of escapes, which corresponds to equal numbers of labyrinthine situations, which combine without leading or starting or finishing. This is how stile are, reflections of a centrality that, with modernity, has ceased to exist as a thing in itself, transferred, instead, into arithmetic fragments that carry our memories, memories of a rapport that has changed over time, retaining its original pieces, they become turning points that lead in different directions, but can suddenly lead back to the starting point, in a metaphysical essence, simulated, which surround us with its totality, whose function is purely communal, because it belongs to everyone and to no one. Therefore all we try to do when it comes to creation is arduous, just like the eternal and repetitive trying of Sissify, who climbs and climbs and rolls and rolls. Estrangements, like actions, make something new and different with the space, a new interest, a new form of attraction, which is necessary because, otherwise, it could slip in the fatigue and tediousness of what has been already seen, of what has been already assimilated. It would no longer attract the eye and it would become lateral, marginal, but if it is crowded with continuous formulations the borders of which are not well defined, it becomes full of a fascination that widens and spreads like an oily stain, striped, segmented, diverted, which seeks to define the outline of a figure, which remains undefined and, indeed, will never be defined, yet it is this quality that causes it to attract, the “how” of this doing is a mystery, like the Purloined Letter by Edgar Allan Poe, a “secret” that by showing itself shamelessly makes us travel innocently into the unknown.
Seduction. What else if not seduction? Almost everything happens in sequences, in this huge intimate input, which belongs at the same time to the species and to the individual, interpreted in different ways by different cultures, but with the purpose of breaking isolation, solitude, silence, to create a series of amorous correspondences of feelings, auditory, tactile, olfactory, visceral, which act in synchrony to determine a state of harmony within the meaning of poetic composition and within the aesthetic of the hermeneutic, almost like a game, composing and decomposing, with everything put at risk, even the realest of emotions, the most unscrupulous feelings. Seduction is a place where freedom and imprisonment take place simultaneously, but in the end this is exactly what we all want, we all want to have a shell but it has to be interchangeable, in equilibrium, in disequilibrium, in rhythm, because we are kept in a constant tension between proportion and disproportion, in the desire to see the stars and the infinite but while being in a room, a safe place, a whole. A sort of melancholy comes from the infinite, because we are confined in our body, in its magic and in its anxieties that are projected onto the dreams of the cyclic rhythm of rising and dying stars. Cycling until the point at which diarchy is born, a diarchy that comes from Freud and Jung, one looks at the mechanism and at the future, and the other one, like a mirror, looks at the archetypes and at the past, while the present (which is always with us) regulates our bodies, regulates the air we are breathing, our heartbeat, the alphabet of a creative language, which is a variable geometry, an hourglass, a singing of sirens, Tasso and Leopardi, offering us the wisdom that the pinnacle of everything is what we create through ourselves and with the world.
Abstraction is best interpreted as a manufacturing of feeling, the act of surpassing symbolic truths to enter mysterious forests, in which everything can be said and done because no one who is there seeks to spy or eavesdrop knows how to decipher the code, and so the magnetic signs which contrast dialogos and muthos multiply, in duality, like the idea of movement with the divine immobility, in a continuous walk at times on the stars, like that of the shaman when he wants to arouse the fate and quell the beloved. Completeness generates new things when it meets fates and casualties, idols and icons, but it wants to do more and other and different things so it has to emerge free from the consciousness condita, it has to be Apollonian and get lost in every direction for it is only here that it can find different harbourers of love, and the strength of this scandal is that it becomes baroque or something similar, and in doing so makes room to place Beethoven, Mahler, Berg, Bartók, Boulez.
Squilibrium, is the casual upset of emotions and feelings, like freedom of expression, which in itself contains an invisible internal symmetry in overdrive, which bears the discomfort of the unorthodox writings, not to become mythologized in a spiral of repetition, but to stretch out always to new interpretations that we know as Impressionism and Expressionism, placed together like a dusky and enigmatic conspiratio, and made of that which is merely a sembrance and that truth that hides itself, always subtle, always elusive, longing to discover and to remove the veil from the grand map of hidden codes, like a great auroral postmodern lacework, making rapsode within a concave and convex universe built upon baroque opulence.
Stefan Anton Reck. Pittura. Suono Gesto Segno
Iemme Edizioni, Napoli, 2014
TEXT
Pierre Boulez | >>>
Vincenzo De Vivo | >>>
Andrea Fasano | >>>
Francesco Gallo Mazzeo | >>>
Alan Gilbert | >>>
Caterina Ianni | >>>
PRESS
Nello Arionte| >>>
Mario Basile | >>>
Paola De Ciuceis | >>>
Mario Franco | >>>
Marcello Palminteri (I) | >>>
Marcello Palminteri (II) | >>>
Giordano Mare Aldo Saulino | >>>