Nataliart

Cremonini’s epiphanies

Notwithstanding the professional art critics, the number of people who have written on Cremonini remains impressive: Alberto Moravia, Stephen Spender Louis Althusser, Pierre Emmanuel, Annette Michelson...

Novelists, philosophers, poets, film critics, and so on. This is probably due to the fact that his painting, albeit eminently "pictorial" (vast campituras, sfagli, geometrical patterns, cancellations of textures), never ceases to be quite literary and philosophical. It narrates, organises ambiguous plots and hints at a series of (obviously visual) contemplations of the role of the subject, of the gaze, of desire and pleasure (these are recurrent terms in the artist's own discussion of his work). This is the great risk (as well as the advantage) of artists who are narrative in some way (and not necessarily figurative; there are figurative painters who narrate nothing, whereas I believe that Pollock sought to narrate something, even perhaps the trajectory of his very gestures), the risk of creating thematic variations, literary exercises, transcriptions into other material. In a nice essay on Cremonini, Moravia begins by effectively remaking Cremonini sur memo/re, that is, by narrating a story so representative of his life, a memory of little Agostino on the beach. Yet, is it certain that these gestures are negative, running counter to the very nature of painting? A painting, similarly to a narrative, is a text, and a text is a device that produces interpretations. I believe that Cremonini paints also in order to provoke mental responses.

He says so himself: the painting is a window. It is he who is looking, of course, but, upon opening it, we all look, and certainly each one sees the world as he conceives it, even when someone has predetermined his perspective and lighting. I thus read what he says as I make the effort to connect Cremonini's painting with contemporary literature. This is something that needs to be done, for Cremonini's painting seems to have come into being by way of reexamining the labels of the history of contemporary art. Surrealism? Certainly not; what is there that is surreal in these representations? Cremonini's world is the world of everyday reality. A new manner of representation? But what does that mean? That he depicts the human figure, the walls and the window frames in a different way to Courbet's? There is so little to deduce from this. Metaphysical painting? Certainly, to some extent, especially in the recent years, but this applies to hyper-realists, too. Hyperrealism? It is absurd, for Cremonini lacks the obsessive fixation and sense of photographic representation, as his figures are elusive while they are eaten away by leprosy that photography would never be able to frame, except perhaps by moving the camera, and even then with uncertain results. Therefore, labels are not sufficient. There are two possibilities: either a painting (as well as a poem, or a novel) is the diary of underlying processes, that is, the narrative of the world in which it has been created on again, the painting (poem, novel, film) is the text, the signcovered surface. From that point onwards what the creator sought to express is of no consequence, but (since signs refer to systems of existing conventions, to our conceptual habits, our heritage of knowledges, memories, desires, fixed ideas) what we make it say, and, of course, we cannot make it say everything, except in cases of lunacy, but a limited range of possible messages, for which its creator has provided, unknowingly, a genetic matrix.

Often, these two possibilities (let us call them "the rediscovery of the artists' poetics" and "an open reading of the text or a reading of an open text") are incompatible. The artist wished to say certain things and ultimately said other things: a text is a form that history spends its time filling up (Barthes).The creator stays behind:"The artist, like the god of creation, remains in the interior or behind, or above his work, invisible. withdrawn up to the point of vanishing altogether, unconcerned, preoccupied with manicuring hit nails" (I will explain the reason for this reference to joyce below) In Creinomni's case, we may also try to hear what the artist himself has to say about what he wanted to do, or at least to examine certain keys, which he proposes in his essays or discussions, Among these, I will only examine three. First key: Order versus jouissance. Cremonini encloses his constructions (which are windows) with rigid geometrical relationships; in the interior of these "small theatres" that emerge, he tells the story of a puissance, and, therefore, of a disorder, of a desire, of the quest for a free painting, in which even the human figure is under erasure, appears through vague magmas and becomes evasive or fragmented.

Second key: The possibility of the frontground versus the background. Cremonini warns that, even when we sense analogies, he does not work like Bacon. The latter erases the interiors and figures, while Cremonini starts with in erasure, an initial amorphous entity and (like Michelangelo who starts with the marble that had to contain the form in advance) brings to surface bodies and spaces. Cremonini begins with a surface that seems like an amorphous painting: spaces, traces of colour; indeterminate figures; then gradually, he describes recognizable images. Whatever remains nebulous and amorphous is not due to distortion but what finally failed to take shape as form from the initial amorphous entity.

What does this statement of poetics imply? Cremonini belongs to the classic, anti-modernist movement, he does not seek to comprehend the laws and the nervous system of the material (which project the perception and the paint-ing) but seeks to compose forms in order. When he does not complete them, there are certainly reasons. There is a painting entitled From the imaginary to the visible, showing an empty room (there is nothing but a dog) which looks on a veranda to the sea (everything clearly depicted), there is a frame with a canvas which does not seem to be by Cremonini's hand but by a nonfigurative artist. Nevertheless, Cremonini claims that that was the original painting, before developing into what it is today. That is, the painting captures the scene of "puissance", which was later arranged in the interior of a geometrical order of lines.

Third key: Mirrors. I do not need to reiterate what contemporary literature has said about mirrors. Nor what psychoanalysis says about them. Naive belief holds that mirrors serve a process of identification (it is indeed me), or examination (I am wearing my tie all right). In reality, they serve us to probe into what we must not see. If they serve a process of identification, they are always traumatic (am I this Other?): the mirror stage (Lacan) dictates our identity at the same time that it abandons us forever in doubt and ambivalence. This is Cremonini. These mechanisms of reading are not insignificant; yet let us imagine that we have not listened to the artist yet. We have resorted to them on our own. I will now try to speak of what I "read" in Cremonini (as a text) before I hear Cremonini (speaking as a constituted by a birth certificate constituency, which is, as I am informed, the material source of these texts and the partial financial destination of the profit made by them).

My first reaction is rooted in a theoretical definition of the way of seeing not related to painting. References: Joyce's theory of epiphanies, Eliot's objective correlative theory, Shklovsky's defamiliarisation theory."By an epiphany he [Stephen] meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. He believed it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments."

In the beginning, these phases were rather commonplace: the smell of rotting cabbage, the Customs House clock suddenly appearing at night, all lit up in the fog, a random conversation in the street, a commonplace someone said, a smile, the unflinching gaze of a preposterous young man flipping a coin: the insubstantial acquires substance.

Further down, it is about a vision on a beach, which initially was about a girl lifting her skirt up her bare legs and slowly being transformed on the page, into a wondrous bird. Yet, it is at the same time that the poet's soul "shrinks», «sighs old", images and words "are emptied" of their immediate meaning, and something appears. What? Perhaps the meaning of life (which at first has nothing to do with the object as stimulus, but which becomes, Eliot would continue, its objective correlative: one could show the fear of a handful of dust...),the connecting tissue which exists underneath the objects composed by the forms of everyday perception. From then on, one hardly rocognises the normal; something has occurred, namely, a deceleration, a difficulty to perceive. The object appears "strange", that is "foreign", and what once was a horse, and was described as such, becomes an inconceivable horse that we for the most part see for the first time, as if we had never seen horses before in our lives (for we have seen too many to recognize them any longer to invoke Shklovsky here).

Something is revealed during an epiphany; something that we were always able to see but never really looked at. In an epiphany we peep at reality (the voyeur metaphor recurs both in Cremonini and several of his critics: the peep through the keyhole restores a wealth of signification and gives an outline to things that would have lacked it if they had been open to a full vision; the voyeur is burning with desire as he peeps through the keyhole at bodies that would hardly interest him under normal circumstances). Epiphany: for Montale it may mean a few sharp bottle glass shards on a wall; for Cremonini, a dog, whose muzzle emerges from the corner of a white wall (Cremonini's Games without players could have inspired a short-story in Joyce's The Dubliners; his Still Trains might very well illustrate Montale's "Goodbyes, whistles in the night, coughs, gestures... ".Conclusion: Perhaps automata are right).

An epiphany is when we see the bathers' bodies for the first time, not as they appear above the water, but as they are below the water An epiphany is the world as children catch a glimpse of it, which, as it is natural, Moravia likes so much (who precisely writes some epiphanies of his own for Cremonini), and Cremonini obsessively insists on the presence of children in his works, for only they have their eyes wide open. Cremonini creates epiphanies yet at the same time depicts in his painting the subject which "epiphanies" reality and, therefore, if we wish to be accurate, he constructs epiphanic representations of the process of the epiphanic revelation of reality. At this point, Cremonini's poetic statements meet the reading I propose. The defamiliarisation caused by mirrors is one of the tools of epiphanies as a restless recognition of the ambiguity lying within the web of physical perception; they make the canvas operate "as a doubt, as an iconographic crisis" (Cremonini). In order for the epiphanic vision to achieve maximum effect, rather than erasing what has already been seen, one might be better off extracting the object of the vision from a magma of urges and suspi¬cions that would have previously illuminated our perceptive and figurative habits. In order for the epiphany to be consolidated, Joyce said, the artist must "disentangle the subtle soul of the image from its mesh of defining circumstances most exactly and reembody it in artistic circumstances chosen as the most exact for it in its new office". In other words, this is a dialectics of order and jouissance, a meticulous reconstruction of the personal motives of restlessness and desire.

Moravia says that in Cremonini children spy on the world as if something were going to happen, whereas nothing happens; yet, in epiphanies nothing ever happens: even what seems to be happening appears as frozen.

In reality, recognition emerges out of complete defamiliarisation; yet, what is recognized never becomes clear An "epiphanic" text is, more than other ones, a signification-producing device.