Between
the driving force of Cavalli and the technical power of Fornara
stands the madman, the joker, the truly unclassifiable artist,
insufferable for some, pure genius, and therefore voluntarily
misunderstood: Lorenzo Peretti Junior. The man himself, with all his
eccentricities consecrated to the extreme and his anxious and
unambiguous desire to get to the bottom of things, bursting with
iconoclastic violence (he "kills", though never repudiates,
his master Cavalli and his confrère
Fornara) and histrionic nobility; that Lorenzo Peretti Junior, the
one portrayed as a wild painter, a crazy monk, the artist from Val
Vigezzo: brilliant, irascible, persistently and perpetually hostile
to the claustrophobic, self-satisfied art world. Coming to the study
of Fornara through the publications of Dario Gnemmi, I identified the
year 1922 (which coincides with Fornara's official exit from the art
clubs of Italy in favour of a life of luminous solitude, with no
gallerist vultures or promotional bandwagons or political camps) as
an aesthetically and ethically prodigious and promising moment: his
choice of austere seclusion, in its way inevitable, added lustre and
distinction to Fornara's genius. The light of that choice illuminated
the artist's works,
making
them
more
genuine, authentic, personal. Yet, turning from Fornara to the
contemplative quiet of Ciolina and the reassuring grace of
Rastellini, I slammed brutally into Lorenzo Peretti Junior. A
brusque, deliberately difficult painter, vigilant and presumptuous -
because of the techniques he used and his outrageous decision to hide
his works, from the very beginning, from the late nineteenth century
onwards (after his apprenticeship at the Rossetti Valentini art
school and the canonical trip to France, and perhaps after watching
his friend Fornara fall into the clutches of Divisionism), almost all
of which live in the timeless realm of the "undated", like
the wall carvings of a primordial master, like excavations that speak
to us from the unnerving past or from a future formed of rare
survivors - Lorenzo is an artist who risks being barely noticed.
I remember I was
fascinated by this critical insight of Gnemmi's, decisive for any
artistic strategy: "If an artist can work for himself, defying
the limits of his knowledge or the boundaries set by critics and the
inevitable judgements, sometimes harsh, sometimes hasty, made by a
public in many cases devoid of education and information; if an
artist is content to make discoveries and, with no need to sell, does
not exhibit his work or show it to anyone; if an artist is so
cultured that he has discovered the very essence of his potential
creative will and wants to translate it into acting in complete
freedom from the bonds of a common poetics or collective
interventions, then that artist, at the cost of being labelled a
misanthropist, will have perhaps discovered the principle of his
equilibrium."
This
is a stern and crucial concept: art has its origins in the memorable
solitude of the individual to then turn to address an other - without
that other it is defeated, irremediably altered. Lorenzo Peretti
Junior seems to have disintegrated the referent of his work, and so
his paintings are like medical reports from a world swept away: hints
of a pagan and lost Arcadia (the enchanting Woods of the Druids
[Bosco
dei druidi],
apparent also in the peaceful Undergrowth
[Sottobosco]
where trees, river and bushes are like creatures in motion: wild
boar, hawks or extra-terrestrial jaguars), the entrails of ruined
villages, undone by neglect and greed, as in the magnificent Oratory
[Oratorio]
where a small white church, perfect as the Heavenly Jerusalem,
shimmers above denuded yellow fields that resemble a desert, and
trees reduced to tangled black threads of iron that nail heaven to
its sins.
Then
there is the legend of Lorenzo Peretti Junior, a painter so sure of
his greatness that he allowed himself or even wanted to be considered
less a painter than a madman and a layabout. There are no images of
Lorenzo. We know him from a portrait made of him by Fornara in 1890:
nineteen years old, hair parted in the middle, big unkempt moustache
and a violent gaze, eyes slanted and narrowed, like an outlaw who
challenges weaklings to a duel for money then seduces - and frightens
- their women. There is also a photograph: it shows Giovanni Battista
Ciolina, standing, his wife, kneeling, and their little daughter;
Lorenzo is seated next to the little girl, we see his hat, his
moustache and beard, but the face in the photo has corroded away and
the eyes cannot be seen, like an ambiguous sign of blindness (eyes
not adapted to this earth).
There
is also his pervasive cultural anarchism: Lorenzo Peretti Junior
pursued an artistic path all his own, corroborated by sinister,
complex readings. His library, recently dismembered - seriously
compromising the reconstruction of his aesthetic journey - is one of
the most impressive and bizarre in the Val Vigezzo, the locus of his
"...encounter
with the thought of Steiner and with Kardec, his reading of Eliphas
Levi and the Buddhist and yogic texts, and his exploration of the
non-systematic Western philosophies [which]
led the artist to an inner freedom ultimately devoid of rationalistic
constraints and expressed as pure insight"
(Gnemmi). The publication and partial interpretation of his
"Spiritual Testament" provided another key to understanding
this brilliant and mysterious artist who is like a literary creation
of Jorge Luis Borges, decidedly different from his father Bernardino,
very elegant, well-groomed and severe, from a photograph of whom his
son, in 1894, exercised his skills in a vivid portrait that made his
parent seem more benevolent and less self-possessed.
This
is the reason why, without entering into their merit, the Vase
of Flowers
[Vaso
di fiori]
by Lorenzo Peretti Junior is drastically different from the ones
depicted by Cavalli and Fornara. His vase stands in a rough grey
setting, encircled by fruit, while sticks, branches and flowers that
look like bronze circles emerge from its innards. It is as though we
are observing the scene in
a mirror scorched by time, whose glass is beginning to melt from the
inside, warping a clear and accurate view. Consequently the image
seems remote, or a prophecy of a time still to come; consequently it
is not so much eternity that vanquishes us, but something harsher and
more difficult to paint. Lorenzo Peretti Junior found the point of
fusion between past and future, discovered the timelessness of memory
and prediction. What has been merges with what will come to be, and
above the immense waterfall of time the painter erected his kingdom,
his immaculate refuge.
In
the same way, the glimpses of nature - always grim and livid,
captured in an instant of complete awareness inside a vortex of mania
and madness, like Grey
Landscape
[Paesaggio
grigio]
or
the analogous Landscape
[Paesaggio], devoid of melancholy or valedictory violence - show the
proud vibrant form of things: the mountains look like the back of a
galloping horse, the lanes like the fangs of an invincible tiger.
Peretti Junior discovered that there is no boundary between things,
only an exchange of forms, that time is a bizarre notion created by
man, which will last as long as man does, that death has already
happened and already been defeated. So there is no need to hope for
resurrection, because ultimately we are all already the risen from
the dead, the unquiet survivors. It is an extreme artistic
achievement, which only seclusion permits, and only in rare cases,
that carries the works of Peretti Junior into areas beyond the
confines of art: they must be learned, properly, like scripture.
Text
by Davide Brullo
Taken
from Passionate Incompetence. The First Fifty Years of the Poscio
Collection
Volume
edited by Marcovinicio, M.me Webb Editore, Domodossola 2011
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