The Nude Silence

by Floriano De Santi, 2000

Secret and in full sight: this is the mode d’etre of Marilisa Pizzorno’s art. Full of expressive potential but also visionary force. Fuelled by imagination, ability and descriptive and illustrative skill, but also by a firm and intellectual gaze. An angelology of ethereal creatures with glabrous skulls populate cubes with clouds that turn into dragons twisting from the windows. Houses soar through the air, or touch down to take flight once again, in a profound and symbolic poetic process: as if they emerged from the depths of an abyss in which metaphysics had drowned all images, obscuring the mundus imaginalis which is never found in what the work depicts, but in that which eludes us in it. The nature of Pizzorno’s palette is dreamlike, but instead of being unsettling, it suspends into an intimate vision; instead of igniting and blazing into flame, it tends to cool down, The interaction is between painting and magic, between fantastic impulses and some kind of hermetic iconography: in short, between a fructiferous procedure and oneiric variations at once pregnant and distancing, firm and determined. Technical and compositional expertise blends with an alchemical imagination, the many rivulets of which spread into myriad iconic signs and paths. In this metamorphic Stimmung, in the paintings Aspettando la pioggia (Waiting for the rain) and Lo specchio d’ottone (The brass mirror) from 2000, Pizzorno pushes her imagination to the heart – hidden and perturbing – of appearances, a network of unknown correspondences that can define a different frontier of significance. And in the drawings Casa in costruzione e graffiti (House in construction and graffiti) from 1998 and Casa in costruzione (House under construction) of the following year, she forges through to hell and the underworld in search of a kind of “ monstrous” logic that allows us to grasp, above and beyond the shapes so clearly contained in her expressive style, those other shapes that have excluded themselves – or even the shapeless – that can only be reached or described through a long and rational deranging of our senses. br> The landscape illuminated by the sudden apparition and vanishing of the angels, is that of the evanescence of things in the nothingness from which they spring, until, as the great Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi wrote in the “Cantico del gallo Silvestre”, “a nude silence and a lofty calm will fill the immense space. So this marvellous and frightful mystery of universal existence, before being declared or understood, will be dispelled and disappear”. Then again, in Racconto interiore 3 (Interior tale 3) from1999, the lovers illude themselves that they exist, while their embrace merely hides the pulverisation and disintegration of everything into the all, where we’ll never be able to reach it. They preannounce and prefigure the “nude silence”, the silence that is no longer mute expectation, but fulfilment and end. With a severity that makes one shudder, Pizzorno tries to expel from her cursive writings all pretences and liabilities that do not tend towards epiphanic beauty as the representation of a terrible and obscure truth, to which we have access only through the desert inhabited by ghosts and obsessions that have always remained on the margins of visionary reverie, pressing in on it. In works such as Autoritratto nello studio (Selfportrait in the studio) from 1996 and Coppia-albero (Couple-tree) from 1997, the world’s chaotic disorder turns into a merciless order, protected from all emergencies, like the one represented by the “replicants” – angels of the modern, bearers of a message which, having pronounced it, will disappear into nothingness, like the other angels of the modern that populate the works of Benjamin. In her more recent works – drawings, paintings and sculptures – following Pizzorno’s “ interior tale” brings us from nirgends, from nowhere, from being lost in the cosmos, to the figures and things that walk the earth. This journey is an act of the subject’s redemption, not from transience, as some would have us erroneously believe, but in transience - where even the waves of smoke, the figures of human beings and animals that emerge from the past (Blake more than Escher, Rilke more than Kafka), unexpected, only make the thoughts that accompany us into the obscurity of our consciousness more strange and uncertain. On the threshold of dreams and the Id, Pizzorno tries to give places and evocations of night maximum lucidity, almost a blinding clarity: the flavour of a meticulous Flemish painter. The scenes are constructed with compact and impenetrable contrivances, where the object-signs return, and even psychological analysis -which could have made her beautiful lines yield – becomes a geometric instrument. The artist seems distant; we think we’ve found her in the lightness and airiness of the tale: in the shadowy sign of Narcissus, “the son of light”. But actually, Pizzorno’s agile brush dashes between the facts, stripping them of all weight, all relief, all gravity, leaving a maximum of suggestion and radiation. It shares the sensations of her characters: and in the meantime, it glides over the constructions, untouched by what it is telling, attracted by something that is always farther away, beyond the horizon.

 

Translation by Gabriele Tonne