| THE SECOND INSTALLMENT OF ENZO AMENDOLA. (Mario Lunetta) |
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Il faut, dans la traduction des oeuvres d’art philosophiques, apporter une grande minutie et une grande attention: là les lieux, le décor, les meubles, les utensiles (voir Hogarth), tout est allégorie, allusion, hieroglyphes, rebus. Charles Baudelaire I would not consider the recent phase of Enzo Amendola’s work as possessing a more expansive warmth in respect to the icy precision of his images a few years back. Instead, I would be rather inclined to see a certain intensity in an immediate and decisive interrogation on the part of an admirer. It is almost as though the subtle “defensive” diaphrams of before have, to a large extent, dissolved, if not come to a halt. In this series of recent works (mainly oil on canvas) the painter has reduced the distance between text and onlooker almost to the point where he urges involvement, or what one might see as connivance. It seems to me that his vivid and highly calculated paintings have entered a process of leisurely tasting their own internal flavours, after the frigid games of reflecting back sections of human figures and objects like some kind of jetsam after a catastrophic event: a micro-universe where the marine scene functions almost exclusively as a brilliant backdrop but the Mediterranean light falls short in removing the disquieting “criminal” atmosphere that forced the human figures, animals and things into living an extraordinary life of the dead (even with its sensuality and eroticism); all are gripped in an anxious silence, as though faced with a catastrophic event or else suffering from shock after it struck. And so today we find the oneiric dimension transformed by the power of the painting into the flow of everyday life and blocked in the mental scale of a photogram; the visionary is entirely focused on the thread of a definitive glance that brooks no reply. Amendola’s endeavour has always been primed with a very strong spirit of reflection. At the most it might have prompted me to mention a “philosophical bent” were it not for the danger of engendering confusion upon the exceptional , matchless quality of his language in which cohabit, in absolute fusion, the energy of a judicious eye, an astonishing technical ability and curiosity interwoven with culture: in short, a whole skein of peculiarities which form the character of an astounding figurative talent; especially in the Italy of today where culture has sadly dwindled to loudmouth improvisation and shock publicity. Might we speak of the most recent Amendola as the work of an artist who intends to tone down his relations with the reality he explores ? An invitation to a game with a softer focus ? An analogical opening up of his meandering strictures in the handling of space ? Not a bit of it ! Because any move of this kind would remain all the more extraneous (if not blocked from the start) to the Amendolian hallmark of lucidity: the precision of his eye which, through a sort of slow moving metamorphosis, pinpoints the mobility of the subjectperson who has stuck in his own exactness, his own relative instability amid the passable geometries of the space he occupies and where he seldom plays a leading role. If, until recently, the beauty of the images of this Roman artist constituted what Cocteau calls a sort of “laic mystery” enclosed in itself, these recent works substitute the suspended ambiguity with a new complexity of conception: a habitus worn with style in order to tout changer ne rien changer, but engraved in the icon to make it more material, a still more open photonic density. This stage of increased complexity pours upon the image forcing it into the availability and vivacity of a more closely identified protagonist. It strikes me as the beginnings of a new dialectical commitment between the work and observer, in the sense that the text-witness relation is enriched by the transposed senses of a vaguely ironic enigma, a shade of confidence that has grown less cautious. The state of waiting continues to bear the strain of subtle uneasiness, but the tension has acquired something terrestrial unknown in the previous phases. What I mean is that proceeding through these mute emblems has given way to situations that carry words, unspoken though they may be. For the Amendolian linguistic aspect this has resulted in a considerable shift in composition. That remote dreamlike quality hovering in the “metaphysical” visions of the previous phases, now materializes and animates with more elaborate dynamisms.; the foregrounds have a different turbulence, the human image as well as the objects reveal a pregnancy that comes close to provocation. Nature – no longer an alabaster side piece or the blank component of an unsolved jigsaw – demands an evaluation of its presence in concrete terms. Obviously in this happy alteration of structures and distances, the palette has undergone more than one shot of vitamins towards the density of colour; a break away from the physical existence of man and things - in fact from the very existence of the material world. It obviously determines a resulting increase of material density, along with colour texture in the vegetation and skies, which are sometimes given an almost playful atmospheric treatment with the vaporous movement of clouds. It is as though the aesthetic cruelty and the almost automatic slowness of the dynamics had been a ruling factor in the works of Amendola until a few years ago. In its own way it gave the human figures and objects the tremendous sense of belonging no where. Like foreign entities in an extraneous world, partially let loose, this could almost be seen as a gesture of restitution on the part of the artist, in the course of developing his recognition/reconstruction to create a more liveable and more friendly microcosm. This capacity which, in the past, endowed Amendola’s images with such strong abstraction, in spite of his rigorous fidelity to the lifelike, appears to be filled with a voluminous robustness that shatters the spatial order and tends to trample the rules of the icon underfoot. In these impeccable shining oils, as in the drawings executed with renaissance mastery, we find an exuberance which, within a system of ferocious rules, now appears to demand the personal right of arbiter. And so it is that his attempts to achieve maximum concentration all tend towards an allegorical dimension which is inexorably immersed in the contradictions of today, aesthetic semblances and conflicts among men. The violence of the world enters these splendid figurations, and with it the violence of keeping silent, paralleled by the purity of those appearances within floods of light or pockets of shadow. We see the pieces of a fulsome almost arrogant presence: Interno con donna che si veste [Interior with a woman dressing ] (2007), or the alarming intensity of La Porta [The Door] (2008).We notice the attention given to a work executed with mathematical precision, but all strategically fashioned upon a network of impenetrable co-relations between the man with the white bathrobe , the blue towel, his shadow personage and the pile of newspapers strewn across the floor of the pier (2008). We can penetrate a painting down to the most highly significant details with a fascination that is more than spectral or theatrical, like the splendid Il vestito nel giardino [The dress in the garden] (2008); and we pause, not without a certain suspicion, at this piece of magnificent, arcane success (a play of chromatic relations of extreme refinement) which is Ritratto nel parco, [Portrait in the park] (2008). We are aware of the many admirable ways in which Enzo Amendola’s painting has grown, not upon itself but inside itself, his unrenounceable vision measured against the opaque crust of the world. “Tout pour moi devient allégorie” runs a famous line of Baudelaire in Le Cygne, one of the most desperately Parisian poems in Les fleurs du mal. This also goes for Amendola whose eye continues to see beyond the gleaming image on the canvas (or on paper) in order to signify something else; something this artist, whose coherence never ceases to be enriched by highly acute and profound sense impressions, has no need to shout about, but simply to suggest, to imply. (trad. Adrian Cook) Mario Lunetta |
