GALLERY:
MONTAGNE 2000
THE GLORY OF THE NIGHT
Fabio Maria Linari crosses and contemplates the kingdom of untouched silence and the rule of shadows and twilight in this latest feverish series of mountain landscapes. Large works which are views, or rather visions of a rocky and dark mountain meta-cosmos, a universe that is perhaps the feature of his destiny, and which certainly has the same colours as his native sea. A symphony of Prussian blue, lapis lazuli, green backgrounds, dull Venetian gold and flesh-colour, in an unfocused timbre of moon-like tones. Tones which evoke the Wagnerian atmosphere, the "wild and rocky" peaks of Valhalla and Valkyrie, the sylvestral scenario of Parsifal and Tannháuser, and epic geography with "the characteristics of the mountains."
It is no
coincidence that the place - ideal and psychic, archetypal and legendary - from
which the artist set out on his post-romantic grand tour of the reality
of the sublime and wonderful, was the marble quarries of the Apuan Alps, site of
the solemn elective primordium, the embrace of two infinities, the great union
of two eternities, between terra ferma and the open sea. Indeed here the white
and stony world of the Alpine ridges, vertical mineral and geological scenes,
and the great motionless granitic mass of the "frozen snowcapped Alps"
admired by Petrarca, seems to identify itself with the incessant horizontal
changeability of the maritime and Tyrrhenian world, to which the Ligurian and
nomadic Linari assigns chiefly metaphoric, threshold and oracular proportions.
Linari's work is a
poetic exploration en plein air from top to bottom, of ridges and chains.
of foreshortened peaks and mountains, with an only apparently changing landscape
which on the contrary has the fixedness of a very slow overhead flight, a flight
which is not changing in the algid wind of high altitude and nightfall - a
perspective repetitiveness, an architectural and compositional essentiality that
almost infers an initiation ritual of the eyes and consciousness.
Linari reacts to a
contemporaneity which has eroded and mortified the same notion of the sublime -
that "depth" of the mind and soul that the ancient Greeks named hypsos
and from which originated the same modernity, by willingly accepting the
challenge of reassessing the pieturesque, pitting his wits against Leonardo da
Vinci who founded the "genere" of landscape painting: "Adunque
tu, pittore, mostrerai nelle sommità de' monti li sassi".
Thus for Linari the
beloved Tuscan peaks of the Cisa and the Grignone, but also the Orobic Alps and
mountains of the Tyrol, have become not only the habitat of mystery, the final
altar of a "natural" residual infinity isolated from our present but
on the contrary rather the pretext for congenial, solitary and serene but
volitional painting, for collapse and death without sentimental reserve or
guarantees of the trade, within the primary vocation of colour and image. And
with the manual skill and sensuousness of painting with the expanded times of
magic, in which the singular liquidity of the oils, liquescent almost like
watercolours, melts into the pastels in perfect osmosis. Pastels which in turn
are crumbled, pulverised and warmed by the artist's digital pulp, by his
incessant amorous embracing of the paper until it becomes an integument, texture
and tissue, until it makes flesh, uniting with the support, almost covering the
black of the sheet like a velvety mantle, like an evening mist.
These works, chosen
from many others, substantiate a pictorial morphology which implies qualities
now rare in terms of their freshness, control, instinct and direction, a
gestural dynamism of signs, in a sort of extremely personal experimental neopointillisme
of matter. Here the refined contrast between the brilliancd'of Naples yellow
and zinc white on one side, as well as the deep shadowiness of the burned Earth
mixed with ivory black on the other, lights up tormenting high lights, a depth
of horizon between mountains which are sometimes dizzy and pyramid-like and at
other times soft and rounded, but always extolled as sacred humps of the world,
since - as Thomas Steams Eliot wrote - "we feel free in the mountains.
"In Linari's voyage pittoresque, in this latest updated and matured
pictorial language of his, we can undoubtedly see the coexistence of bloodlines
and certifiable inheritance, dominant and fatally destined to meet in an
outspoken nature which is gifted with the sublime and the action of first
intention - the so-called Venetian-mannerist line of the great Italian school.
By this we mean the late and now disappeared painting of Tiziano, Tintoretto and
El Greco, certain eighteenth century landscape painting and painting of ruins -
from Guardi, Magnasco and Piranesi - and on to "dark" Goya. Then there
is the expressionist ascendant, both Italian and Nordic-Gennan: Viani and Sironi,
but above all Munch, Nolde, and on to the fabulous eighties of Fetting and
Lupertz, and the sumptuous pictorial cosmogony of Kiefer. But in Linari's work
what remains above all is bis Ligurian DNA, the language and art of poetry of
the Tigullio region, between divisionism and symbolism, the unforgettable
coloufistic lesson of Merello, with his masterful musical range of greens and
blues, and the work of the father Giacomo Linari whose extended painting truly
has the feel of the sea.
These landscapes by Linari, these stage sets of nature live in a dimension of silence - in them we
hear only the whisper of the wind announcing the inescapable night, the
Leopardian splendour of the night, the necessary result of a glimpse directed to
the centre of things and our current condition of mankind. They are certainly a
tribute to disorientation and anxiety, but also to the calm, solid and
ontological eternity of creation, albeit observed from a peripheral and
deliberately uncertain perspective. Linari's viewpoint is a hard one, but his
painting still gives us that mystical wonder evoked by the words of John Ruskin
and his mountain notebooks, "Great cathedrals of the earth, with their
gates of rock, floors of cloud, choirs of torrents and stones, altars of snow,
and vaults full of purple crossed by a sowing of stars...
Domenico Montalto