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Things of the mind
David De Biasio is a painter-painter. This statement, coming
right at the opening of the catalogue of his first Italian solo show, might
sound rhetorical, but it is not.
Painting, Leonardo teaches us, is, above all, a
“thing" of the mind. Picasso defined it as “something suspended between
canvas and paint.”
Painting, therefore, cannot be merely reduced to and
understood as a language of expression; it is also the result, the expression, the end of a communication/abstraction that traditionally takes shape
through canvas, brushes, and colours.
Yet, in our modernity, we have accepted that works of
art created through other techniques and languages can also be forms of
Painting. It would be wrong-headed not to recognise that Bill Viola’s videos or
some of Damien Hirst’s or Jeff Koons’ installations, to cite but three extreme
examples, contain a strong “painting” component, although pursued by
unconventional means. A different point, and a central one here, can be made
about photography: born as imitation and simplification of Painting (Daguerre
was a painter and Niépce an engraver), photography has always been subordinate
to Painting, seeking to break free of it only in the most extreme modernity. But
the very tight bond of substantial dependence between photography and painting
is only partially real; it is easy to argue against it because optical
instruments, the very forerunners of modern photography, were already used, and
even deemed to be essential to painting, as early as the first half of the 15th
century. Extraordinary examples of this are found from Jan van Eyck, Leonardo,
and Caravaggio to Ingres and all the way to our days, to the American
Hyperrealists. In fact, the relationship between photography and painting was
reversed by their rise in the late 1960s. In the American arts scene of those
years, Art stops representing itself and sheds all aesthetic, even visual
reference, to evolve into a kind of anti-art.
The new American Art must pose questions and question itself, bring about a
reflection, whatever the cost; it shall not exhibit itself, or awe, let alone
narrate or illustrate. The event replaces the image as the subject of the work
of art, thus undermining the centuries-old primacy of the icon and the central
place of the object/subject. Photorealism’s birth fits in this landscape
dominated by abstractionism in its many forms (from Pollock’s and De Kooning’s
violent expressionism to Rothko's seraphic spirituality); it is another (and
higher) outgrowth of Pop Art, sharing with it a return to the object/subject,
the hyper-visual foundation, and, especially, “the aesthetics rooted in the
visual artefacts of street culture.”
Without dwelling too much on the modes of expression of the original
photorealist painters, two aspects of the American photorealist tradition seem
pertinent to this introduction: the ongoing reference to the “street culture”
of the so-called “American myth” and the use of photography, also as a base to
make one’s own paintings. The first characteristic is easily identified in the
choice of subjects: glimpses of city views, daily objects, symbols of American
pop culture (cars, motorcycles, neon signs, trademarks, logos, advertising images,
etc.) The second, and more treacherous one in the aspect that fuses painting’s
and photography’s techniques, is found in many of that season’s historical main
players who made (and make) broad use of photographic bases printed on canvas,
identifying in this a deeply revolutionary conceptual impulse (from Paul
Staiger, Stephen Posen, Franz Gertsch, and Chuck Close to Peter Maier.)
We all know that, in painting, the end always
justifies the means and that its tools of expression have evolved for centuries
along with the new scientific and technological advances. And for just as long
throngs of purist have formed and risen, ready to question the legitimacy of
the newly adopted tools or techniques. In the early 15th century,
Jan van Eyck perfected oil painting and introduced its use in preference to the
traditional tempera grassa; some, at
the time, called it a scandal and even talked of an “unclean technique.” The
same scandal was denounced when, during the same period, the camera ottica, ancestor of photography and cinema, was introduced;
and the scandal is renewed today by the use of projectors, aerographs, or
photographic bases.
The utilisation of technology in art and painting is therefore
not new, nor is it really unacceptable. However, the case of photographic bases
demands a deeper discussion. The current very simple and accessible use of
latest generation plotters and printers, supported by digital cameras and
highly sophisticated image processing software, fostered the rapid (and
mysterious) rise of a crowd (as large as it is suspect) of “hyperrealist
painters,” for lack of a better term, having surprising technical skills. The
suspicion and surprise are not generated by the extraordinary and truly
seductive beauty of the paintings created, but rather by the improbable number
of works produced, and by the very high graphic definition, in some cases
impossible to match with painting’s traditional tools. The suspicion that these
images are processed in the computer, printed photographically on canvas and
re-painted (or touched up) is something more than a guess and, in itself, if openly
admitted as the American masters do, would not be a minus, or even less the
object of blame. What should really cause a scandal, especially in the face of
ostentatious purist pride and loud ethical hypocrisies, is the behaviour of
those who translate suspicion into reality, hiding the true nature of their
works of art: the use of pre-printed photographic bases, somehow transforming
an absolutely legitimate practice into a colossal and grotesque farce.
When, at the start of this presentation, I defined
David De Biasio a painter-painter, I intended to sweep away, once and for all, any
doubts about his expression research and his amazing technical mastery. As it
often happens when someone possesses true talent, these two qualities,
interweaving and melting into each other, create true originality, that
inventiveness, that unprecedented visual conquest from which it is difficult to
come back.
De Biasio's visual education took place in Italy, in
close contact with Beauty and with our great artistic and architectural
tradition. And this is evident, also and above all, in his aesthetic and
expressive choices, in the adoption, at least up to now, of the “Still Life” as
his preferred genre, as well as in the proud, but never ostentatious or
extremist, sense of belonging to that noble progeny of painters deeply rooted
in the artisanal dimension of their “doing art”, in the inalienable and
voluptuous “sensuality of contact with the canvas” (De Biasio’s words) through
brushes, colours, and oil.
In this sense, De Biasio is a painter firmly anchored in
the Italian tradition, also, but not only, because of how he looks at and
represents his reality. Attention to
tradition, then, but also to its renewal: that “tradition of the new,” indeed,
which has characterised our art from Giotto to our days. In fact, while the
tools of his work remain pure and traditional (white canvas, frames, brushes,
oil paints, and varnishes), the study and elaboration of the image/subject are
enriched by new stimuli and tools: from digital photography and its computer
processing to projection on the canvas; exactly, but in a much evolved form, what
Jan van Eyck, Leonardo, and Caravaggio did, oh so scandalously, with the camera ottica.
“Hyperrealism” is often mentioned when speaking of David
De Biasio’s paintings (I have done it myself); this lucidly and consciously
simplifies the terms of the question and focuses on the evident surface of the
paintings’ manifest expressivity. But can a painter be defined hyperrealist or
photorealist simply on the basis of the very high definition of his realism? In
a nutshell: can the form overwhelm the concept, the ideology that underlies a style?
As we have seen,(American) Photorealism and the
derived (European) Hyperrealism were grounded and still rest on well defined
concepts and expressive finalities directly derived from Pop Art, also, but not
only, through a totally unprecedented use of photography. On the other hand,
all this cannot be in any way compared to the expressive research, and
subsequent creations, of so many Italian “extreme” realists. In Italy, as in a
good portion of the Old Continent, the trend towards absolute realism has
origins that are well defined and deeply rooted in time. We come back, again,
to the mid-15th century and again to that revolutionary Jan van
Eyck, inventor of methods and techniques. In Italy, that exasperated search for
mimetic truth finds outstanding examples and continuity through Leonardo’s,
Caravaggio’s, and Cagnacci’s lessons, to mention but the early ones, who can be
defined as anything, even “pop” forerunners, perhaps, but not ideologically
hyperrealists!
De Biasio himself took his first steps in the world of
painting pursuing a classic, far from extreme, realism. His visual revolution
took place in the United States, where he lived from 2003 to 2008, enriching
his visual perception capacity thanks to his contact with the variegated and
lively New York arts scene and, above all, through his direct interaction with
the original Photorealism. This experience led the Italian painter not so much
to an ideological embrace of hyperrealistic concepts, but rather to technical
learning, to strictly in-depth pictorial explorations aimed at achieving an extreme
realism steeped in the Italian sense of Beauty.
Moreover, his Still Lives reflect a just as strong
drive towards light and Nature’s wonders (often represented also in its
“mineral” dimension, with marbles, shells, and rocks, almost as in a
Wunderkammer), without the American special effects, mirrored and mirroring
deformations, or grandiosities; rather, they dwell on the strength and warmth
of colour, on the harmony of compositions, on an almost mathematical, although
never sidereal, absolute control of all balances.
The subjects then are the least “Pop”, and therefore the
least hyperrealist in a narrow sense, that one can imagine; on the contrary,
they fully belong to the “Still Life” genre that, since Caravaggio, has been
assumed and rose as autonomous and typically Italian.
In this case, therefore, one should speak of “extreme
realism”, perhaps of “cynical realism”, when the coldness of the representation
excludes all emotional involvement other than the awe before a graphic marvel
(but this is not De Biasio’s case.) Certainly, it is not conceptually correct,
here or elsewhere, to refer to concepts such as “Hyperrealism”, or even less “Photorealism.”
Even in De Biasio’s latest pictorial research, the “No
logo” cycle presented here, the potential “Pop” tendency given by the use of immediately
recognisable bottles is transformed into a sort of extreme reversed
neo-Morandi-style, that here is implacable, inexorable, and so totally arrogant
in its perfection and in the stupefying play of light, shadows, and
reflections, that it defies any attempt at a reading in any way hyperrealist.
The other intent is clearly pursued
through the systematic and complete elimination of all logos and trademarks,
hence “No logo,” the latter ones being the essential, primigenial, and inescapable
elements of Pop nature.
A return to the origins then? De Biasio’s paintings
confirm Martini’s postulate that the only possible modernity is that of
sensitivity. De Biasio is the living proof that five centuries of history can
converge and renew themselves in the simple and limited space of a painted canvas.
But the glance, the eye, and the mind that underlie its creation are the
beneficiaries of a heritage and a dignity that no technology, no invention, no
shortcut can erase. Just as nothing can replace man in the creation of that
“thing wholly of the mind” called Painting.
Alberto Agazzani
Reggio Emilia, March 9, 2011
