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The belligerent Ếmile Zola was convinced, and quite rightly, “that art thrives solely on fanaticism”. In a particularly militant essay on the much admired Manet, written in July 1867, he states that the most striking thing about the work of the painter of Olympia is his implacable precision of the eye, “a necessary consequence of the exact observation of the laws of values”. Then Zola splendidly adds, “ the whole personality of the artist consists in the way his eye is structured: he sees blonde and he sees in masses.”
These observations come to mind as a series of recent paintings and pastels by Enzo Amendola passed before my eyes. This somewhat arbitrary, but by no means incongruous, association has a basis of consistency: on a general and theoretic level of course; not on the level of a relationship or the Roman artist’s artistic descendence from the great impressionist. True, because our Amendola, in a way of his own, sees blonde and sees in masses; in the sense that he perceives the world as traversed and steeped in light, and in this lucid, boundless light he places his figures, his still lifes and his rather disturbing archaeological pieces.
This eternal and all absorbing marine light is where his masses live, but theirs is not a life that can be in any way pinned down, as is the case with transfers; as masses they are deprived of volume; in the end their existence is that of the transient magical figures printed with limpid clarity on some transparent sensitive photographic plate. Museo n. 9 (1995)
I mention enigma and in fact the entire development of Amendola’s painting strikes me as marked by his very acute sense of awareness that everything we see conceals a core of the unfathomable, actually all those who are longing to see are likewise struck by a kind of untranslatable logos. Try to get to know these people painted with such impeccable, peremptory sureness, with such chromatic and constructive skill: men and women, most of them young, or very young, are always surprised in a questioning esoteric attitude, in a state of off hand expectation; at the same time they are mysteriously passionate. In an attempt to ask questions they are unable to find the words for they await a solution to the problem of living. In this sense all of Amendola’s fascinating painting could be defined, witty or no, as a metaphysical quiz.
A metaphysical quiz it may well be, but it is submitted to a distancing cinematographic effect. The cut of the casual appearance of the images, which often surprises us, is in fact the classic side shot of a photogram. Their extraordinary epiphany lighting clearly derives from that kind of involuntary disorientation that defines their gestures which, for the most part, are blocked in a sealed environment. What will inexorably affect them, in this doubtful and fleeting instant of the most subtle expectation, is disappointment. After all, can there be a more hushed 20th century mood in art than this ?
Disappointment and disenchantment pulse feebly through almost all the art of the century that is not directly tuned to the tragic and the catastrophic. Even the rappel à l’ordre after the storm of avant-gardes sees disappointment as its own little wound. In Italy we have actually made a banner of Plastic Values, and the magic realism of the candid Donghi tries to go its way with a faint smile. The fact is : with the death of the avant-gardes the world stopped. The language of art backed out, lost in thought. Everything is silence, or rather passivity. Fine.
The almost fanatical clarity of an artist like Amendola, his silence, his immobility, reveal vibrations charged with alarm. For example, it is here that his awareness of today’s mal de vie makes the difference in respect to a certain Donghism of manner or certain naïve inclinations with which little Italian painting, too ill from the “cleaning up”, miserably emerged in the 1950s and ‘60s: it is a difference of intentions and intelligence. Amendola is powerfully equipped. His is a sophisticated painting which speaks to today, admittedly tapering and defining his own poetic limits with ruthless filtering: from the milky and chalky light of Vermeer to the “empire of lighting” in the illusionistic window fronts of Magritte; with the blessing of our never-to-be-forgotten Morandi and - naturally for an Italian – the ever present homage to (or the ever present memory of) Piero della Francesca.  Viaggio n. 15 (1996)
This is where Amendola’s discourse covers three main points: man (sometimes he is given a sort of emblematic animal : the irruption of the dog in both the oils and the pastels is absolutely striking); the museum pieces; the seascapes. (Aeolian in particular we must suppose). The chromatic answer to such a burst of Mediterranean light is, one might say, a chastened insolence; solid motionless backgrounds; the limpid laying on of paint for an impoverished chiaroscuro; a meagre palette. The lighting of these pictures and drawings mostly derives from a paradoxical use, invented and anomalous, of the mixing: where nature, as nature, is presented as a falsity. Fixed and firm towards any kind of imitation.
Here, within an alienating silence, we have the resonance of concentrated reds, purples, blues and greens, all of them surprising, while the human figure appears at his most helpless in bodily presentation, enclosed in a theatre which can only contemplate the (interior) monologue, powerless before open confrontation, but inclined to present himself only in a three-quarter view or from behind. It is as though the axis of his own psychic consistence has undergone a twist, a tiny forewarning of anxiety. In these pictures and pastels nobody knows anybody else: this accounts for the pronounced mildness in the figures (but also in the drawing and the colour), but it conceals a considerable dose of aggressiveness. No point in hiding it. It is the aggressiveness of the world: the same daily horror which no marine splendour nor any exhumation of the gods of antiquity can exorcize. And that is what this intensely secret painting re-proposes, with no clamorous affirmation, but through the sheer force of poetry and its purely immaculate style.
Mario Lunetta
(Catologue of the exhibition at the “Lombardi” Gallery, Rome, 1997) |
