MLB Maria Livia Brunelli home gallery è uno spazio ibrido, un luogo d’incontro insolito per l’arte contemporanea. Si trova in un palazzo affrescato del Quattrocento nel cuore di Ferrara, tra il Castello Estense e il Palazzo dei Diamanti, dove Maria Livia Brunelli ha aperto una galleria comunicante con gli spazi della sua abitazione. A inaugurare l’ottava mostra dello spazio è Timothy Tompkins, artista californiano che si confronta con le ultime nature morte di Morandi, di cui e’ esposto un disegno quasi astratto. L’artista assembla oggetti anonimi individuati fra le rimanenze degli scaffali degli ipermercati americani, li fotografa e poi li dipinge in composizioni che rimandano all tradizione della natura morta. Ne risultano colorati “still life” del nostro tempo, molto attuali nella loro critica anti-consumistica. La mostra, in collaborazione con Studio la Città di Verona, è in concomitanza con “Morandi e l’incisione” al Palazzo dei Diamanti di Ferrara. MOSTRA: After still life ARTISTI: Timothy Tompkins e Giorgio Morandi SPAZIO: MLB home gallery INDIRIZZO: Corso Ercole l d’Este, 3 Ferrara APERTURA: 04.04.09 / 02.06.09 IDEAZIONE MOSTRA: Maria Livia Brunelli CURA MOSTRA E TESTO IN CATALOGO: Maura Pozzati
In copertina (fronte): Timothy Tompkins Left Overs Winter 08 v.1, 2008 (particolare)
For a contemporary natura morta by Maura Pozzati
Timothy Tompkins lives in California and is an artist, I live in Bologna and am an art critic: we share our year of birth and our love for still-life, for Chardin and—maybe for him, certainly for me—for the drawings of Giorgio Morandi. Seeing Tompkins’ works exhibited nearby a magnificent drawing by Morandi, so different and distant from a formal point of view, I was compelled to reflect on the concept of still-life and search for the relationship between their works. I remember a line by De Chirico that said that the Italian name for still-life natura morta, literally “dead nature”, must be changed: “Natura morta has another name in German, much more suitable and beautiful: this name is stilleben, silent life. Indeed natura morta is a painting that represents the silent life of objects and things, a calm life, without sounds or movement, an existence that is described through volume, form and plasticity; the objects, the fruit, the leaves are stationary, but they should be moved by a human hand or by the wind. We’ll change the name of natura morta… We’ll call these paintings silent life, as they are called in the German language”. The concept of silent life is such that it unites the American painter Tompkins to the “painter of painters” Giorgio Morandi and relates with the concept of time and dust. Dust in art is a fascinating theme and, as Elio Grazioli says in his eloquent essay dedicated to the topic, is the protagonist of the history of western art: from Leonardo to Marcel Duchamp, through the Baroque still-lifes and paintings of Chardin, to the most recent tendencies of contemporary art. In our case the dust isn’t ready-made, it isn’t a shapeless metaphor, it isn’t a way of confronting entropy, nor is it a metaphor for our own dissolution: rather it is the inscription of time, something more secret and magic, something having to do with the slowing down of a painting. Dust for Morandi is the subtle and dark layer that doubles the surface of things, that doesn’t darken its brilliance and “twinkling”, but adds still more and makes the surface visible to its full worth. The objects that Morandi paints are left dusty and then painted with touches of dirty-white, because they are anachronistic objects and live a quick rejection in respect to exterior time. According Cesare Garboli: “Painted touches of grey pacify them, soothing them all the more, those objects: already objects of the painter’s mind, visceral parts of time. The rest of the room is in impeccable order: all glittery due to careful
sisterly cleaning; only that magic circle wraps the opacity desired of those objects assembled as if in defense of each other, as if in a gentle whirl of dust, of poor enigmatic indifference, already fantastically taken off toward their social utility in the inventive duration of the mind and eye of the painter, for which things, interiorly stirred in their presumed immobility, reveal the length of time in their phenomenological objectivity”. The object of Morandi appears mysterious, laden with a non-static memory that reveals new possibilities every time. And if one looks closely at the drawing in the exhibition, the object as well as being mysterious becomes ambiguous, because it is without the bond of object concreteness: the hermetic image, where the game of positive and negative forms takes priority and where the object becomes a faint reflection of a thing, an uneasy shadow, a sorrowful fragment of a vision. The object reaches an “abstract form” in a continuous exchange between substance and absence, between positive and negative, between light and darkness. But we come to Tompkins, and to his American still-lifes: here one doesn’t deal definitely with dust but in this case with “waste”, of objects that tempt to resist the dramatic consumption of time and that offer to the viewer in their “duration” of real time, that become disposed on the shelves of the stores, to then be passed and forgotten. If the greatness of Morandi is to open new situations and to make new possibilities emerge, the Tompkins showing is the confirmation of it: the Californian painter doesn’t photograph and to paint the objects closed in their reality, but gives them an ulterior possibility. And the loyalty to the simple and every-day things, ordinary and trite, it is the attempt to describe things as presence-essence of time: the humble objects transformed in visions to refill, to realize over and over, to construct in time in being. Tompkins puts you at the front of the material world as if in front of something of the every-day and he photographs it in the instant in which it is the most negligible: houses, tables made in a hurry, the shelves of department stores. Then, thanks to the computer, he frees the common things from the scum in which they are immersed, he alters and emphasizes them using ultra-brilliant enamels and pushing the work to abstraction. One could say that, after having photographed the objects dusty and dirty, and having shown them in their normalcy, one feels the desire to dust them—in the sense of removing them from the patina of time—to give them a new life. And he does just that, first adjusting the image by computer and reducing the colors, and then painting them on top. In Tompkins’ work the object represented, unaware of its stupidity, is presented without emphasis and without exhibitions, as if it is natural that it is in a domestic or commercial
environment: at a certain point though, thanks to the technical and pictorial progression, that same object becomes the starting point for an artistic reflection, that puts the question of painting at the center: the final image appears different, brilliant and luminous, altered and accentuated-“as if it were wet” says Tompkins—because that which interests the artist is to “give an indefinite motive”, highlighting in this way the distance from the original. And in this there is a tangible affinity between the two artists: when it was said of Morandi that his final works seemed abstract he responded that there is nothing more abstract than the visible world. Because for a painter attentive to the worth of the composition, to the “pagination” of the shapes of the objects, to the rhythmic harmony and above all to the accumulation of light, that which is of the greatest importance it is the material nature of painting. Also for Tompkins the true point of arrival is painting, a different painting, that uses brilliant enamels, spread on aluminum sheet, that have the aim to make the work teeter “between the vagueness of the image and the materiality of the enamel applied”. The objects, that after this deconstruction hint to the heart of the painting, are driven toward the threshold of abstraction and they seem to be liquefied before our eyes. Giulio Carlo Argan, wrote in regard of the drawings of Morandi: “The continuous repetition of few figures, of objects in themselves insignificant and deprived of every capacity of recall from that insistent repetition, had the effect to cancel them as individual objects. Morandi was the first to smile about the fools that were moved by his love for those poor things: he didn’t love them at all, to him they were so normal that it didn’t have much sense to describe them. But by cause of having repeated them, he had chewed and digested them to the point of making them serve as simple ingredients or materials of the research.” Thanks to the continual and incessant drawing Morandi converted the same “humble” objects into pictorial material. Tompkins does the same exact thing, using first photography and then the computer: the point of realization is the painting, painting that is complex and stratified, liquid and precarious. He said himself: “I create my paintings with the language of the painting. Conscious of my historical references, the work doesn’t try to
hide the fact of ‘being a painting’, an object that has a long and complex history”. The history of painting that Tompkins knows, one that attends and pays homage, is faithful to the idea that contemporaneousness and experimentation don’t exist without memory of the past. Written in Italian by Maura Pozzati February 2009 English Translation by Sophia Levine April 2009
Natura morte, 1963 matita su carta 22.5 x 16 cm
Leftovers Spring 09 v.15 - drawing, 2009 Inchiostro, pittura d’alluminio su carta 56 x 42 cm
Leftovers Spring 08 v.1 (after Morandi), 2008 Vernici industriali su alluminio 81.3 x 91.5 cm
Leftovers Autumn 07 v.1 (after Morandi), 2008 Vernici industriali su alluminio 68.6 x 91.5 cm
Leftovers Winter 08 v.1 (after Morandi), 2008 Vernici industriali su alluminio 66 x 91.5 cm
Leftovers Winter 08 v.10 (after Morandi), 2008 Vernici industriali su alluminio 63.5 x 91.5 cm
Leftovers Winter 08 v.6 (after Morandi), 2009 Vernici industriali su alluminio 122 x 91.5 cm
Leftovers Winter 08 v.3 (after Morandi), 2009 Vernici industriali su alluminio 122 x 91.5 cm
FLASH INTERVIEW Timothy Tompkins, curated by Maria Livia Brunelli 1. How were the works for the series “STILL LIFE” born? The objects that I paint come from a chain called Target, whose stores don’t only offer the same products but have the same arrangement and the same furnishings: this creates an estranged sensation, augmented by the fact that every three months, following the cycle of the seasons, the merchandise is changed, in that way articulating the passing of time. 2. In respect to Giorgio Morandi: where does your research coincide and diverge? My interest in Giorgio Morandi is born from our common desire to remove common objects from the everyday and render them worthy of attention, to give a history to objects that don’t have a history. But unlike the works of Morandi, in which there’s a synthetic order, in my works we find chaos, and the infinite space of his still-life works becomes instead the closed space of the shelf: the objects are frozen in an instant of their consumer driven lives and they are truly, therefore, “still-life”. 3. Morandi aside, often in your work you refer to artists of the past: why? I paint, after modifying them on the computer, photographs taken from newspapers or TV that people don’t immediately remember and therefore become “waste”. The names of the works refer to the name of the artists that inspired them, whose ideas are reinterpreted in modern ways (for example “After David” is a work on contemporary civil war). At the same time they bring back the raw data of the photography, almost a pure code, how the mass of images that casually pass before our eyes doesn’t leave time for us to name them. 4. Which contemporary artists do you feel akin to? I closely follow the work of Gary Hume and Gerard Richter, of Ed Ruscha and that of Vija Celmins. 5. The technique you used to realize these works seems to “liquefy” the images. How do you achieve this effect? I begin by digitally reducing the number of colors in the photographs to emphasize the difference from the original, because memory doesn’t record the details. Then using industrial paint, I work by pixel like the pointillists. This technique produces, as well as a certain level of abstraction, an effect similar to that of liquidity of the memory. Furthermore these paints conserve a “wet” luminosity, as if the work were still in the process of becoming.
FLASH INTERVIEW Franco Farina on Giorgio Morandi, curated by Maria Livia Brunelli 1. In 1978 you organized a showing of Morandi at the Palazzo dei Diamanti. Did you know Morandi personally? I met him a Cesare Gnudi’s house shortly before he died, in ’61 or ’62: he was a tall man, slouched. Morandi represented Bolognaness to its fullest. He was difficult, a very ambitious person, envied by many because he was bound to the Soprintendenza and the Arcangeli. 2. Did Morandi give you the drawing of his that you own? Yes, but it was given to me by his youngest sister Maria Teresa when Morandi had already passed, about fifteen years after the showing that I had organized. Marilena Pasquali called me to tell me that Miss Morandi wanted to speak with me. I arrived at Via Fondazza to a not-sospecial condominium, but the house was still perfectly intact: a house where dust didn’t exist, with a peculiar smell, different than that of today’s clean. The sister told me that I could choose between three drawings, and that once I chose one, I would find a note under it that said, “I knew that you would choose this”. That made me somewhat displeased, because it meant that I was predictable. The choice fell upon that [drawing] because it was the most abstract, the most enigmatic. 3. The drawing that you chose, executed by Morandi a year before his death, reaches a level of absolute synthesis of forms, don’t you think? Yes, it was realized in “controluce”, that is executed with the light coming from behind, and is therefore in a situation in which the object is almost white, that which renders it most mysterious and problematic. It is an almost unpublished work, only having been exhibited once in Genova. 4. To those that find the works of Morandi repetitive, what would you say? Morandi never repeated a work because of the fact that he put a cylindrical vase in the place of a small basin substantially changing each composition. And then there’s the problem of tone: the same vase even if it’s repeated never has the same gradient of color. 5. Would you speak of “sanctity” in regard of Morandi’s works? The cheap objects in his paintings are no longer cheap objects, they are from the basilicas, they have a potential that transcends the object. The cheap object is the pretext. But more than sanctity, I would speak to a sense of devotion that Morandi had in his encounters with these objects. Franco Solmi considers Morandi shy and “difficult” from a social point of view, and it’s true: he took refuge in this type of world, a world of objects, far from man.
Timothy Tompkins was born in Long Beach, California in 1967. He graduated from the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, California, beginning his artistic journey influenced by the art of Vermeer, Delacroix, and Monet, and revisiting works of artists from the past to research the origins of painting. Now he is working on a series of still-life works that lend themselves to the theme of the common object and the commoditized object, as did Morandi and Warhol. Since 2002 he has shown in many galleries in the United States, including DCKT Contemporary in New York and Susanne Vielmetter in Los Angeles, and since in 2005, he has shown in galleries in other countries such as Studio La Citta, Verona, Italy. He lives and works in Los Angeles. Giorgio Morandi was born in Bologna July 20th 1890. In 1908 at the Accademia di Belle Arti he was introduced to the works of CĂŠzanne by which he was heavily influenced. He engraved his first etchings at the beginning of 1910. At the same time, he came in contact with other artistic realities of the era, from the futurism of Marinetti to the Metafisica of Di Chirico and CarrĂ , who he met in 1919. In 1928 he showed at the 16th Venice Biennial and in 1930 he received the post of Docent of Engraving Technique at the Accademia di Belle Arti of Bologna. In the following years, he received a series of national and international recognitions and awards, and showed all over the world, from the Aja to London, from San Francisco to San Paolo of Brasil. He continued to live between Bologna and his home in Grizzana until his death in 1964.
A SPECIAL THANK YOU FOR THE COLLABORATION OF Maura Pozzati Hélène de Franchis Franco Farina Gianfranco Maraniello Marilena Pasquali EXHIBITION CONCEIVED AND CURATED BY Maria Livia Brunelli ORGANIZATION Ketrin Costa CATALOGUE Eva Beccati PRESS OFFICE Francesco Ceccato (national) and Sophia Levine (international) FUND RAISING Alessandro Costanzelli Irene Del Principe Alessandra Tamascelli
PREPARATION Benedetta Bodo and Massimo Marchetti VIDEOGRAPHY Leopoldo Muschitiello Giovani Luppi under the supervision of Professor Vitaliano Teti (University of Ferrara) GRAPHIC PROGRAM Eugenio Ciccone CATALOGUE PRESSWORK Communicazione e Stampa ANOTHER THANK YOU TO Emanuela Agnoli Silvia Brunelli Fabrizio Casetti