| 2012 - THE GIFT AND THE PROJECT OF ENZO AMENDOLA (Mario Lunetta) |
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The gift (and the project, obviously) of Enzo Amendola’s visual work is something I’d be tempted to define as unnatural naturalness: the artist has always exerted on his matter, confined in a very concentrated perimeter, a valiant formal safeguard and a clear rigour. The authenticity of the immediate relationship with the subject is always put through a series of second degree interventions that modify its sense and measure. The artificio, the Russian formalists’ prïem, namely the primacy of shape over content, is a de-regulating element always present in the research of this Roman artist. One needs to say, however, that Amendola’s syntax proceeds with oblique movements, avoiding any declared confrontation. Though within his organically compact synthesis, in his firmly plural system of nature, it strategically aims at causing distress in the viewer’s certainties, thanks to a (never sensational) play of movements, postponements, discards, allusive détours which, even in the less explicit situations, inspire, on a narrative level, alarm and suspicion. The artist’s works, from the fascinating oil paintings to the skilful etchings, seem to have been self-generated. At first glance, the viewer’s impression is somewhat similar to the suggestions given by the poetics of “impersonality” that in literature were, between Flaubert and Zola, the modus operandi of a late Nineteenth century realism, more visionary than mimetic. Well, a painter such as Amendola tends to disappear from his work, while always transferring on it every responsibility of viewpoint and style. Of course, he doesn’t always succeed, as in the marvellous case of one of the most perturbing paintings in the series of works from the latest years, such as Il bagno, 2011. Here, without any contradiction, a double, dissociated and estranged vision of the personae is in fact accentuated in a pictorial drama made extraordinarily restless by its seeming phlegm: all of a sudden, on close up, a full-figured self portrait, absolutely anti-celebratory, is looking at the viewer sideways while giving its back to a female figure entering the waters of the sea, with its still, light green bed, its absence of sparkles, if only for a little wavelet around the her legs. Amendola, as I already had the chance to notice in the past, does not hide his network of absences behind the fetish of incommunicability. On the contrary, he seems to temporarily suspend the communication between his characters, and between these and objects, indoor settings and nature: it’s a sort of philosophical waiting, resolved in a painting with a sobriety increasingly full of inner richness, its figurativeness having an THE GIFT AND THE PROJECT OF ENZO AMENDOLA by Mario Lunetta enigmatic, cruelly inquisitive abstraction, while objects often acquire the role of protagonists. The outdoor armchair is an example (Gusci in riva al mare, 2011); as the above mentioned Il bagno; Bagnante che riposa (2011), created following a completely staggered visual- spatial organization, under a softening light, vaguely revived by moments of more lively colours; L’armadio (2011), in which the white gleam of the armchair entertains a both placid and hostile relationship with the green piece of furniture and the hanging dresses. In these and other artworks the artist lingers without a hint of rhetoric on classical statuesque exhibits regarded as not too different from contemporary objects and manufactured products – above all, I’d say, dresses. Through their role of true protagonists-antagonists, the artist develops a sort of visual and tactile fetishism, lit with beautiful chromatics, often becoming the centre of the image. He does so through dresses, bathrobes, perhaps casually placed on a chair, bedcovers, carpets; and shoes, preferably tennis shoes, left on the floor in an affectionate oversight in the tight corner of this aesthetic universe which masterfully filters even the easy seductions of a summer and marine imagerie, while, on the contrary, being constantly engaged in a profound questioning of the phenomenal chaos, caught, with patient intelligence and extraordinary talent, with its insufficiency, its precariousness and frailty, its morsels of faith. That of Amendola is a tragic painting that never raises its voice. Thanks to its consciousness, it imposes, upon itself, the essentiality of a language rich in a culture made of instinct and nature. And in this series of texts regarding the research of these recent years one can find, with the usual rigorousness, a sort of colour reduction: like a stylistic twilight inclination that, if possible, makes the calmness of the look even more chilling. The random and insane circus that we call the Art’s Market is now capable of giving involuntary lessons of self-interest and deceit. Humorous inventions follow phoney brainwaves: and within the suffocated Culture, with all its compartments now regulated almost exclusively on the basis of mediocrity dressed up as urgency and sensation, Enzo Amendola’s lesson is also – in evident and sharp contrast – that of a Master of integrity and great pictorial distinction. April 2012 Mario Lunetta (trad. Slawka Scarso) |
