THE KEY OF MEANING

In the dreamlike realism of Andrea Collesano

It is an immense pleasure to speak with rediscovered old friends, and to spend a convivial evening together. There are many feelings and motives that lead us toward such encounters, or to rebuild bonds after many years apart. One of these could be to nostalgically recall time passed, hoping to halt its flow, or to find oneself amongst old coursemates, with whom it is so good to remember lost time, precisely because it will never be returned; and so each of us dips our own madeleine into our own teacups.

In the case of Collesano, it is a great joy for me to rediscover a young friend after so many years, already determined, as an adolescent, to become an artist. I can attest, now, that he was not only firm in his aim, but that he is furthermore a serious professional who expresses his art in a form that is rigorous and technically refined, the expression of a great poetic spirit and a deep knowledge, whose roots spring from the great European figurative tradition. The works of Andrea Collesano are inhabited by large cetaceans, whales, and other beings. We are immediately and mysteriously captured by arcane thoughts: one has the sensation of finding oneself before a poetic world built upon great myths, which speak to us of a profound and rigorous way of thinking that leads us straight to the centre of the heart, in which every man holds his most intimate being.

These images force us to look inside ourselves; to look within the archives of our memory, also in that which is more ancestral, in which we find the archetypes and myths of our culture, including those which are most subconscious. The landscape is undoubtedly vast. Who, for example, upon a first reading, does not think of the great whale of Herman Melville? But Collesano, in my opinion, cannot be compared to captain Ahab, who pursues the animal to kill within it a power of nature in which is manifested, or which is symbolic of the power of God. In fact if we look “Ahab…did more evil in the eyes of the Lord than any of those before him…”

(1 Kings 16:30).

These vast spaces and seas depicted do not hide in their depths dark secrets or sinister omens, if not those which every man carries in his subconscious. Whenever I am in front of these works I feel an aura of lightness that pervades them. This quality of theirs leads me to think of what Italo Calvino says in his first “American Lecture”, speaking exactly about Lightness. He seeks a synchronicity between the busy spectacle of the world, sometimes dramatic, sometimes grotesque, and the picaresque interior rhythm that propels him to write. He says: “Soon I realised that there was a gap between the facts of life that ought to have been my prime material, and the rapid, cutting agility that I wanted to animate my writing, which it always took me an effort to overcome. Perhaps only then was I discovering the heaviness, the inertia, the opacity of the world, …it seemed to me that the world was turning to stone, a slow petrification that spared no person or place, no aspect of life. It was as if no-one could escape from the inexorable face of Medusa. The only hero capable of cutting off the head of Medusa is Perseus, who flies on winged sandals, Perseus who does not turn his gaze upon the head of the Gorgon, but only upon its image reflected in his bronze shield.”1

In order to decapitate Medusa without allowing himself to be turned to stone, Perseus relies upon that which is lightest: the wind and clouds, and turns his gaze to that which can only be revealed by an indirect gaze. Calvino sees in this myth an allegory of the relationship of the poet with the world. But again, referring to Ovid, he finds in his metamorphoses elements of lightness in the battle that Perseus wages against the seamonster to free Andromeda. Then he compares the verses of Ovid with those of Montale, a poet of modernity, in the poem ‘Little Testament’, in which we find the most subtle elements that are typical of his poetry: “Mother-of-pearl-like snail trail / or glass grit crushed underfoot,” set side by side with a terrifying, hellish monster, a Lucifer with bitumen wings that swoops down upon the capitals of the West: “But what his verses emphasise are those minimal luminous traces that he contrasts with the catastrophic darkness: ‘keep this powder in the compact of your mirror / when every light has gone out / and the wild sardana turns hellish…’ But how can we hope to save ourselves in that which is most fragile? This poem of Montale is a testament of faith in the persistence of that which seems destined to perish, and in the moral values invested in the most tenuous traces, ‘the faint glow catching fire / down there was not the striking of a match.’”2

I beg pardon for this long digression of mine on Calvino, nevertheless inspired by the works of Collesano, which intrigue me and inspire in me curiosity and references in so many directions, making a short and distracted visit difficult for me. Collesano is an artist that knows wonderfully how to remove weight from things, as happens in these visions, where great marine creatures migrate lightly upwards, ignoring every principle of physical reality. In their slow movement from a liquid state - the seathat here is an illustration of the immense, the profound, the unknowable; the sea as a lower infinity, towards an airy state, the high infinity: and Baudelaire said that one cannot speak of infinity if not through substitute figures, not forgetting Leopardi in his famous: “And drowning is sweet to me in this sea.” Thus these creatures, through a jettison of weight, rise, driven by a desire that is a force of Eros.

This force that pushes us to climb, this upwards movement; desire or ecstasy outside of oneself, leaving behind the world, that heavy and petrified world that encourages common foolishness, replacing the beyond with more, this reflection makes me think of the great mystic John of the Cross, particularly his Ascent of Mount Carmel, where the mystic poet, like Abraham undertakes a great voyage to the depths of his heart, where there are no longer eyes that can penetrate beyond appearances. Here John ventures into the highest mystery, fleeing from the Babylonian prison, “disguised at night with anxious love inflamed”, on a secret ladder towards Syon, and not in the form of a gradual approximation, but in the rhythm of “All - nothing”:

In order to arrive at having pleasure in everything, Desire to have pleasure in nothing.

In order to arrive at knowing everything, Desire to know nothing. In order to arrive at being being everything, Desire to be nothing.3

I find it fascinating how these images of Collesano lead us to reflections from which I find it difficult to extract myself; it’s clear that like every word or thought written or spoken leads to the image of that which it seeks to signify, so also every thing, every representation or object leads back to the thoughts of the one who created it, and the works of Collesano are rich in elements that transport us far beyond that which could be the slim space of a mere illustrative representation. For example, one element appears in a discrete and subtle way with a certain frequency, like a mysterious call: I refer to the figure of the “key”, which beyond its immediate symbolism leads my thoughts in a mysterious and automatic way to Max Klinger, to his cycle of Indian ink drawings (replicated later as etchings and aquatints) called The Glove, a masterpiece consisting of a series of ten drawings, the first of which shows a “place”, a skating rink with various characters; followed then by an “action”, where a young lady skates swiftly by, dropping a glove, or letting it fall, and immediately a young man - who is the artist himself - rushes to pick it up - a precious chance for him who previously, from shyness, would not have dared to approach the lady - but alas, doesn’t manage to catch up with her, as she has already left with her friends.

At this point the “glove” becomes an object of a persistent torment, a symbol and fetish of an erotic and dreamlike obsession, of nightmares around which is set free the passion of an impossible love. Key to everything, the fortuitous falling of a glove, that a young man picks up, but which he might also have overlooked.

This is the element that I see as similar to the “key” present in the works of Andrea Collesano. This could also pass unnoticed by our gaze, but once it has drawn our attention, it becomes a call, a question that traces back to the work itself in its complex of connections, of form, of space and of time and non time, in which it entangles itself towards something else. Towards that weak glow that is not “the light from a striking match”, and which is reachable not via a predictable highway, but outside of well-trodden ways: in a profound space where man comes into contact with the powers and tensions of his inner life. Here we can listen to the infinity that lies within ourselves.

This inner impulse that leads us beyond the confines of our selves, to a limitless opening towards the other and the beyond, in so far as we don’t allow ourselves to be seduced by the din and tumult, not only of the things that stir beyond ourselves, but also by they those that move within us.

Creating art is an eminently interior experience, that opens up great spheres of meaning that envelops and transforms first and foremost the person that undertakes it. Collesano, like Noah, “takes on” all his animals and climbs into the ark for an immersion that definitively changes his life, making peace with them. Because it is essential that man understands that the states of conflict that afflict him, and that oppose him against others, are due to the states of conflict present in his soul, and thus he must overcome his own interior conflict to relate to his counterparts as a man transformed, free and at peace:

Why the whale?...

The largest mammal on earth, this marvellous creature that saves Jonah, a stubborn and rebellious prophet, and saves Pinocchio, allowing him to become a real child, which is man when he is able to remain an artist. Because it is the deep breath of the ocean.

Professor Brunello Baldi, 2022

Translated into English by Rebecca Wall

Notes:

1. Italo Calvino, Lezioni Americane, Garzanti, Milan, 1988, p.6

2. Ibid., p.8

3. Saint John of the Cross, The Ascent of Mount Carmel, I 13,11.

Vixit

Signed and dated on reverse Ink on paper

19.68 × 27.55 ins / 50 × 70 cm

£5,500