The frieze of life and the waiting village

by Gabriele Simongini, 2013

There are artists who are afraid of their works as if they were intimidating spirits. They can’t stand to see them in their homes, for example. Thus Augusto Perez, a restless and distinguished sculptor unjustly forgotten, covered his sculptures with a white cloth so that he couldn’t see them but, above all, so that they couldn’t see him. Perhaps because, as Rumi, the great 18th century Sufi poet and mystic, said, “the images that we create can turn into wild beasts and tear us to pieces”. Other artists, instead, consider their works their only real friends. This was the case with Edvard Munch who, after having chosen solitude as his sole companion, wanted to be surrounded only by his paintings in a kind of absolute spiritual communion. Mutatis mutandis, Marilisa Pizzorno belongs to this latter category: her male and female figures keep her company, nude and hairless, unadorned and essential like the rocks and above all the structures that populate her paintings. This primitive and pure humankind gives expression to her longing for freedom and spiritual expansion, for crystalline moral transparency, rather like a melancholy Eden inhabiting her de facto uninhabitable buildings (de Chirico docet), overlooking cobalt blue seas and skies streaked with iridescent clouds, in a landscape that may recall sun-drenched and rugged Sardinia, where her father was born. The men and women of her paintings are distant, almost in exile from today’s pragmatic, aggressive, hyper-technological, mass media world able to crush emotions and feelings into an indistinct and aseptic mass. Who knows, perhaps they are figures that still have to be born and still have to throw themselves into the existential battle. They’re waiting, immersed in the uncertainty of whether or not they’ll carry out definitive actions, with no turning back. As a result, Marilisa, endowed with masterly skill as regards both painting (it should not be forgotten, among other things, that her mother was a fine portrait artist) and sculpture, creates with patient concentration and remarkable imagination her grand frieze of life, made up of the many paintings now on show. Its ideal and plastic center is the terracotta sculpture of the village overlooking the sea, waiting for its inhabitants – the ones portrayed in the paintings and who only seem to be able to inhabit it in a pictorial space. This is the stuff of an enigma, almost lyrical and elegiac. Have the men and women imagined by Marilisa Pizzorno abandoned the village for some mysterious reason or are they about to go and populate it? Or do they live there in a dreamlike dimension, one that can be evoked only in paintings? Do they dream of it like Ulysses dreamed of Ithaca during his treacherous adventures or do they keep away from it, a place to avoid? It is this coming and going, this imaginative short circuit between painting and sculpture – that could be inverted in the future in a choice to paint only uninhabited structures and model solitary figures – that constitutes one of the outstanding features of Marilisa Pizzorno’s creative path. To our eyes, irrespective of established artistic tastes, these dreamy, melancholy figures, often in search of love, engrossed in silent dialogues made up of glances and intertwined hands, reveal a poetic emotional truth. Which is no small thing today. This humankind, made up of persons, even before being classified as men or women, quietly and humbly conceals a spontaneous ontological reflection on the sense of life, on the attempt to make an effort to become what we really are deep down inside. An invitation to all not to hide behind tinsel, pretence, masks, conformism, mindsets that disguise our interior reality, a reality that often escapes us, dramatically, for our entire lives, until death overtakes us, without us ever having known our real selves, in a state of estrangement from the deepest meaning of our existence on earth. In the presence of the thoughtful and dreamy people painted by Pizzorno, far from the empty and superficial clangor of our times, a poem by Constantinos Kavafis comes to mind: “And if you cannot make your life as you want it,/ at least try this / as much as you can: do not disgrace it in the crowding contact with the world,/ in the many movements and all the talk./ Do not disgrace it by taking it,/ dragging it around often and exposing it / to the daily folly /of relationships and associations,/ till it becomes like an alien burdensome life.” The men and women in Marilisa’s paintings have shed their previous material and mental habits in order to concentrate, in complete physical and spiritual nudity, on the search for themselves in relation to others. Or perhaps, one wonders, they’re a group of angels who are about to throw themselves into life, become human beings, like in the movie “Wings of Desire” by Wim Wenders? No doubt, the enigma of flight and fall comes forth forcefully in many of Marilisa Pizzorno’s works, which may betray a fear to throw herself lightly and fully into the stormy seas of life. But her search does not shy away from confrontation with the historical emergencies of our time, even while transferring them into her own coherent and imaginary territory, centered on the essential nudity of bodies and structures evoking a crystalline interior dimension. This is evident in the dramatic tension of the three male figures’ agitation as they run toward or escape from something, an emblematic image that the artist links to the winds of renewal of the Arab Spring. Here too, as in the paintings in which we don’t know whether the fall ends well or not, Marilisa Pizzorno provides an image of an open situation, quietly enigmatic, in some respects metaphysical (the glimmer of light that separates the sky from the sea in her horizons is indubitably a de Chiriconian reflex), but always purified of any looming or threatening apprehension. In fact, unlike in the works of Pictor Optimus, there are hardly any shadows in her paintings, nor traces of the dual and unsettling identity of the metaphysical demon. That is why an angelic state, prior to life on earth, comes to mind for these figures imbued with an almost immaterial and spiritual substance. In these scenes suspended in a chromatic and luminous, fully Mediterranean, jubilation, we don’t know whether the eyes of the figures who look into the distance, toward and beyond the horizon, are full of nostalgia, regret or of dreamy desire, eager to discover a world still unknown to them, since they may still have to be born. Thus, a real, moving, “dance of life” is what is presented by the grand triptych on show: from left to right, with an enmeshing of glances that seem to beckon the observer directly, there is a rhythmic progression of situations that range from the fear, or at least strong hesitation, of the first two figures gazing out of the building to the woman’s concerned attempt to restrain the man leaning out with curiosity, up to the perilous flight of the man suspended in the void. Are these beings waiting to be born? People tired of living? Prisoners trying to regain their freedom? There is no point in trying to find a univocal answer because these works are based on an interrogative spirit, typical of those who, like Marilisa Pizzorno, seek in depth the mysteries of life. Head high and with pride, crosscurrent to today’s creative fashions, Marilisa Pizzorno can call herself a “traditional” artist, in the illuminating sense intended by Renzo Vespignani: “I prefer to be considered a ‘traditional’ artist, warning you, however, that tradition does not mean transmitting obsolete values or appearing in a historic parade, but searching ‘ahead’, into the future the remote past of mankind, that ancient contract (the constituent pact signed in the caves of Altamira) with pain, with joy, and with the relief of being able to express them through handwork and the ‘terrific’ work of nature”. It may well be that the figures painted by Marilisa look into the distance, into the future, only to return to their origins, to that village of the soul from which we all come.

Translation by Gabriele Tonne