Other fairy tales

Snow White is asleep. She lies motionless in the forest with her head resting on a cushion of white flowers. When the Prince approaches her to give her a kiss, she slips out a sharp knife from under her skirt and... slash! With one blow she slits his throat and severs his head. 

This gory, Tarantino-style scene – only in a Disney version – is the image that Gianluigi Colin sends
 me as a reply when I invite him to participate in the exhibition ‘Curious Shades of Red’. In his reply, Colin is less insidious than Snow White and explains the origin of that image to me. It comes from the Instagram page of Jerry Saltz, the most diabolical, feared yet at the same time honest of all art critics. This small still, sent as a WhatsApp message, 

also offers me the chance to try and define art in one word: the unexpected. Sometimes a certainty conceals its opposite. Often a concrete image raises both suspense and doubt. 

One might object that there is more to art than this: that art is also sheer poetry. If this is so, here is a poem: 

The author of this fragment is neither Disney nor (Jacob or Wilhelm) Grimm, neither Colin nor 

Saltz, but rather Jorge Luis Borges, who knew a thing or two about suspense and expectation, about chess games with time, about mazes of meaning and disorientation. As for the colour red, I wouldn’t know, but then again it has always been a real passion for many people. Red is the name of a colour, which in Spanish is simply translated as rojo. The strange thing is that el curioso color del colorado to which Borges refers in the original version is something that has to do with purple, with that reddish hue of people’s face when they are being strangled, or with the flush caused by sudden embarrassment. English translators of this verse take the liberty of describing it as crimson, scarlet, or simply red. For my father, Giancarlo Vitali, who depicted so many beheaded animals, innocent creatures arranged on white kitchen tables, it was the colour of blood. Looking back at the Brothers Grimm’s fairy tale, I am tempted to say that one of his butchered rabbits (one among many) stands to “Prince Charming” as Giancarlo stands to Snow White. But he didn’t butcher rabbits himself, so the comparison doesn’t really hold. Perhaps, it might be easier to recount, with childlike innocence, the fact that he would often paint flowers – white (or violet or yellow) flowers. Why flowers? Quite simply and naturally, as in Borges’ poem, there was a moment when life disclosed to him a flower he learned to call “rose”... 

The present exhibition, then, is the outcome of a narrative made up of SMS and WhatsApp messages that stems from a regenerating idea, the story of a family and, ultimately, a project dedicated to Giancarlo Vitali which was inaugurated on 29 November 2018 at Bellano (his birthday and the town where he was born and lived). Its title is borrowed from Borges’ poem “Rain” and refers to a colour that is the hallmark of my father’s paintings (be it in relation to blood or not). The idea of setting up a group of artists to illustrate all this was inspired by a watercolour dedicated to Giancarlo by Belgian architect Jan de Vylder. The picture was sent to me through a WhatsApp message on the day of Giancarlo’s death: it consists of a series of three images of flowers that evolve and metamorphose into an abstract splash of colour. The metaphor expressed by that painting was clear: to develop something starting from an apparently simple idea such as the blossoming of a flower. 

It seemed to me that extending this reflection to the rebirth of things was a way of “sowing a seed”.
 I don’t know whether Bellano is an arid place where nothing can spring forth or sprout up again. However, Andrea Vitali, who has been working on this project with me, has ironically suggested that we view it as an oasis – an oasis where to quench our thirst or be regenerated. I felt that this surreal idea of an oasis was enough to possibly extend an invitation to other artists who were working – or had already worked – on the same subject. 

I thus envisaged an exhibition not in memoriam, but rather one that carried a starting direction in its DNA, a white line from which to set off on a new run. Giancarlo had bid us farewell, but his long shadow endured as a long path. And the longer it grew, the more it seemed to affirm a certainty. 

Of course! This is precisely what is portrayed in the wonderful, intense and surrealist pastel by Lorenzo Mattotti that shows a man walking down a path at dusk, with his clear-cut shadow extending and unravelling behind him, only to turn into a flower as it seems to vanish. Conversely, it is also what we find in the black graphite swirls that Giovanni Testori – Giancarlo’s mentor, discoverer, and friend – has dedicated to the gloomy shadows of four 

large, explosive and fleshy lilies (but I am being too “Testorian” here!). 

Such, then, is our investigation. It combines an intense gaze directed to the past with one turned towards the present, in an attempt to open up a new path. 

The idea of a flower is such a powerful one that it can even translate into architecture, as in the case of the mighty tower designed by Mario Botta on Monte Generoso or the buildings entirely covered in ivy ad other creepers that Gianni Pettena captured in a series of photographs in 1978. It is almost a premonition of what contemporary green planning was to become or a reconfiguration of forms appropriated by nature: something “forgiving”. But what if our investigation where to start by charting the territory, to help us understand what species can take root – or have already taken root – in our soil? Weeds too are flowers. So let’s start classifying them and recording them as neatly arranged blades of glass, like Ugo La Pietra, who in cutting individual marks into colour suggests
 a way for us to rearrange things or see them for what they are, in order to then turn a new leaf. We are only one step away from what Franco Pavoli and his wife Neria have already fully accomplished, by gathering and preserving all the plants and flowers around their house, creating a botanical nomenclature that tells a silent tale of origins and belonging – a kind of respect that can be marred by our own carelessness. 

Alessandro Bazan’s paintings are devoted to these incongruous scenarios, in which forests become landfills and tree branches serve as coat hangers for rubbish. The picture that portrays us as the protagonists of our time is, alas, also – and especially – one of this sort: one that shows us indifferent to the beauty before our eyes and to the artist, who invites us to enter the painting so as to clean it up and allow flowers to continue to be flowers. The only person still willing to roll up her sleeves, it seems, is Enrica Borghi. Waste sorting is like a boon to her. The ability to envisage the beauty of nature, which forces us to examine broken plastic bottles, is an alchemy that she alone is capable of. In this mass of discarded objects we find light, colour, harmony and even a most pleasant sound, a voice whispered by the fluctuating world of ukiyo-e, the very voice that Rakusan Tsuchiya heard when preparing his woodcut with “hibiscus flowers and laughing thrushes”... a title eloquent enough! And “while soaring aloft”, someone like Marcello Jori does not limit himself to the depth of words, but extends them by adding one thing at a time, letter after letter, until he achieves a poetic surprise effect that turns into a prism of connected thoughts as complex and symmetrical as Platonic solids – angular and deviant ones reflected in clear-cut geometries, until the maze of marks is recomposed into a simple stalk. This is what a flower is, one might say: a glittering crystal resting on a stalk that is itself poetry. It is up to us to interpret it. Confirmation of this comes from a large-size photograph of a stalk by Brigitte Niedermair. Here nature stands to attention; it is like a colour Mapplethorpe expressing erotic enigmas. The deception lies in the fact that it looks like a painting. As you gaze at it, you think to yourself that the photographer has gone mad, that she has taken up painting. Imagine people’s remarks – “What a weird painting!” – before they discover that this representation is a pure, intangible photograph 

printed on a velvet fabric, like Davide Benati’s Indian paper prints: ivory surfaces flooded with watercolours, overflows reminiscent of flower petals – a meditative world “composed of many petals firmly heaped one on top of the other”. With no need to bring Virginia Wolf into play, we might add: “all reddened, warmed, brightened by the same inexplicable radiance”. Drawing breaches its boundaries, colour turns to light, and this is enough to allow us to imagine a world rich in hue, be they pure pigments or fiery red glimmers. We would truly be one step away from Marco Cingolani’s psychedelic visions, if Donato Piccolo did not remind us that his “heart red” lilies must face certain mechanical issues. Nature + engineering = art. It is perhaps through such a lasting encounter, through something that has to do with atomic energy, that not an atomic mushroom but an atomic flower might spring – a toxic cloud releasing circular and purplish creations, indefinite and electric. So much so that we ask ourselves why Alessandro Verdi may have wished to paint a flower – or why he did not do so earlier. Unless, like Ferdinando Bruni, he believes that what lies behind aesthetic appearance is the sap and heart that gives life to an exhibitionist corolla of petals, to the point of imagining that our own arteries turn into blood-filled rose stems. That what we have is a love for, and drive towards, the intricate natural world becomes certain if we pay enough attention to a rose stem or to a piece of bark, and realize that the flower can be shaped by our own hands. We can never tell whether the sculpture coincides with nature, or vice-versa, or whether, 

in fact, Alik Cavaliere has gone too far, reaching a place where the two worlds coincide and can be enclosed in a fragile bottle. Time passes inexorably for everything and beautiful things wither. Bruno Ritter, what is your take on this? Here, no ice age, or medieval monastery, or ancient castle with Cyclopean walls, can escape the ravages of time. Nature runs its own inexorable course, even when Vladimir Sutiaghin tries to freeze it in a sepia photograph. Greater detachment would be required, a profound knowledge of the meaning of time. It would be necessary to let it flow with the waters of a river, in the direction in which Ferdinando Scianna seeks to rearrange our vision according to the natural rhythms of life. Colour and changing fortune will dominate it. To ensure good fortune, outside our house or in the streets we might hang lungtas made of flowers painted by Michela Martello. Lungtas (to quote Wikipedia) are colourful rectangular cloths often found strung along mountain ridges and peaks high in the Himalayas, to bless the surrounding countryside. These prayer flags are believed to have originated with the ancient religion of Tibet. A great many propitiatory rites are connected to flowering. A flower in bloom is itself a visual miracle and a metaphor for birth, a propitious allegory in pagan and later Christian rites. Francesco Lauretta presents it to us as a token of good wish from the historic infiorata (flower festival) of Scicli, not without a touch of irony in the choice of “red feast” as a title. Instead, I struggle to understand why Caterina Crepax speaks of “red within”, when her giant wedding flower seems to have sprung forth from a huge crimson waterfall. The reason might be the well-established law of contrasts: it is not always the case that what you see conveys the real meaning of things; something else, something more complex, might be concealed. I would advise against trying to explain this to Letizia Cariello, who is a real master when it comes to such switches. She is capable of very simple, seemingly obvious, diversions which transpose 

you into the geometric complexity of puzzles and riddles. Here’s one example: take a rose petal and stitch it onto the green surface of a lawn. Done?
 If you’ve succeeded, you have walked one of the shortest paths teaching you what art is. Impossible things and events are combined, enriching the journey with hidden meanings, as though within the weave of a canvas. Countless symbols are concealed behind the intricate floral patterns of Persian carpets, which once again allude to the complexity of the earthly world and its mechanics, but also to that of the afterlife, with all its deities. Luca Pignatelli takes this as a starting point for his “weaving”, so as to clearly contrast two cultures – Western and Eastern – through a relentless struggle between icons. A real carpet has been created by Giovanni Frangi, who with apparent ease has painted a forest on red velvet. Sumptuous materials and elegant strokes: is this not all we want from art, along with contemplative silence? No, sometimes a refrain will evoke indelible images that lose their meaning once disconnected from words or notes. And it is the fault or merit of a pale watercolour by Bernardo Siciliano – with somewhat wilted roses against an air force blue background – if sometimes I sing to myself: “They call me The Wild Rose / But my name was Elisa Day”. As everybody knows, songs have the power to evoke series of contrasting images. All it takes is a change in rhythm or a new phrasing or quote. It is this, and nothing more, that Massimiliano Pelletti’s white marble represents: “all beauty must die”, as echoed by the heartbreaking and deep voices of 

Nick Cave and Kylie Minogue. There is always an undertone of rebelliousness to their duet Where the Wild Roses Grow, like a partially stifled scream against some injustice suffered or which needs exposing. If only songs or art were enough to bring peace! Instead, they are just blandishments that fade away with the first harsh contrast. I remember a poster with a lush rose sprouting from a helmet filled with soil and, next to it, the word PEACE: the (winning) graphic project that Albe Steiner created for a competition launched by the first International Committee for Peace in 1956. I believe that Oliviero Toscani belongs to the same school and that his explicitly ethical image of a coloured man holding a bunch of colourful flowers with confidence and pride simply means this: emancipation, rights, recognition, equality and peace – through an image that anyone can interpret. Oliviero is the Delacroix of photography, he mans the barricades of images to awaken our conscience, stating in a boldly provocative way that revolution is possible. The image of a changing world also takes the form of an angel that departs, leaving his black shadow behind, like an ectoplasm who abandons his walk-on role and quits the painting he originates from. I am referring here to Botticelli’s Annunciation, which Gianluigi Colin has photocopied and cut out, this time not in jest. He has consciously left a lilly as a historical relic, trapped in the glass of the photocopying machine. But now we no longer know what to do with this flower. We’d rather go for a light-hearted and careless stroll, in the awareness that life always brings unexpected surprises, if what Franco Matticchio shows us in his illustration really can occur: a young woman stooping to pick a flower from a flowerbed without noticing that the stones marking its perimeter are actually the sharp teeth of a crocodile. The proportion in the drawing is altered to the point that it achieves an effect reminiscent of Pinocchio falling into the whale’s mouth. Surrounding the scene is a marvel landscape. The girl, like Prince Charming, won’t have time to perceive the inevitable... 

And so Matticchio defeats Disney! 

I have not forgotten Borges. He would never forgive me if I had. Nor have I forgotten my father, who loved rain and would have been eager to know how this poem entitled “La lluvia” ends. Roberto Fanari wouldn’t forgive me either: with a little metal wire he has shaped a convincing profile of the young Giancarlo. I believe that it shows Giancarlo’s face as he walks along the shores of the lake. I never saw him with a flower in his mouth, as in Battisti’s song, but I can easily picture him strolling in the rain, his hands in his pockets: 

Postscript 

The year between 2017 and 2018 is suspended time for me. In 2017 the retrospective exhibition I devoted to my father, while he was still alive, was entitled precisely ‘Time Out’. 

Now, exactly one year after that event, I am (unexpectedly) inaugurating another exhibition devoted to him, this time in remembrance. 

With hindsight, ‘Time Out’ sounds like a premonition. It is as though, after a recapitulatory tribute, the moment had come to put things in order, pack my bags, and say goodbye.