critical text by Donato Faruolo
What we are setting up at the Museum Casa di Giotto on the figure of Antonio Masini is a verification of an almost chemical nature, of laboratory observation of phenomena, of changing the conditions of exposure of matter to measure its characteristics, reactions and behaviour.
Faced with the possibility of holding the final exhibition of the first edition of the Mediterranean Contemporary Art Prize at Vicchio, in the “Casa di Giotto”, we felt the need to substantiate our presence in this questioning and emblematic place with the authoritative testimony of an artist who was undoubtedly one of the greatest Lucanians of the second half of the twentieth century. We have therefore gathered in these rooms some of his works that are in the possession of the Porta Cœli Foundation, and that have witnessed a significant part of his career: we need them to “celebrate” this moment, we need Masini to respond to an inescapable need for symbolic significance.
Faced with the exposure of environmental variables to an active matter, reactions and mutations are recorded in it which, if they do not insist on the nature of the object itself, certainly affect its readability from changed perspectives. Let us ensure, therefore, that starting from the opportunity that brings us here – presented by a year of terrible turmoil that has redrawn the plans of the world – we can also trace new paths, we can create new senses, new opportunities for knowledge. It is one of these new roads that leads us to Vicchio: a place that, as the subtitle of the exhibition suggests, we do not want to make into just a destination – the destination of arrival of a movement to a place – but the point of a journey that crosses Basilicata, and which is nourished by that fundamental, eternal need to transit, to migrate, to change state, which is particularly beneficial to art and to the elaboration of human tribulations: the way through Lucania is that road which, ideally, through Basilicata, leads from Florence to Byzantium, the two poles of Mediterranean art and Western and European consciousness. There in the middle, geographically and conceptually, for verification purposes, we place the figure of Antonio Masini, halfway between the need to resort to the fixity and universality of the divine that is as much Byzantine as Greek classicism, and the passion for the variability of the registers of the human, of the individual, a prerogative of Latin portraiture as of Giotto’s realism.
So, what happens to Antonio Masini’s material if it is taken to the rooms on Colle di Vespignano that were once owned by Giotto di Bondone? What changes of state will we observe? What verifications will we conduct? What revelations will we witness? The recourse to Masini in this context can certainly not be seen as a mere attempt to confer posthumous prestige on a cultural operation, as if it were silverware for occasions. Like a true trans-avant-gardist, Masini restores the solemn and dramatic experience of painting, not without having first gone through practices of re-signification of waste, of conceptualisation of consumption and consumerism. His is therefore a gesture of compliance with the permanent and eternal sense of the practice of painting as a constant of human culture, from the caves of La Pasiaga onwards. But it is also a re-approach, a mending with memory, both historical and individual, in that eternal feeling of epic that he cannot but share with figures of the Transavanguardia such as Mimmo Paladino, Enzo Cucchi, Sandro Chia or Nino Longobardi, but also with his Lucanian companions such as Felice Lovisco, Gerardo Cosenza, Giovanni Cafarelli or Nino Tricarico. In Masini, however, more than in the others, the presence of an influence is evident that is no longer primordial, prelogical – as it would be especially in the work of Paladino or Cucchi. His crazy race “across” the line of chronologies crosses points in the constellation of the phenomenology of images that allow him to resort not so much to the totemic and inextricable forms that are at the sources of the symbolic, but to the practice of their diachronic development in the text, in the story. Masini makes plentiful use of myth, of the ritualisation of the gesture of trans-human, semi-divine figures, which transfigure until they become states of collective consciousness, original forms of the unconscious. The culture to which Masini has recourse, therefore, is already a modern and western culture that cannot prescind from Giotto’s contribution, and that therefore lives the fracture of the hieraticism of the figure to inhabit the compromise with history, with the cycles of life and death, of memory and story, of epic and drama, of destiny and guilt, of impulse and remorse. A liturgy of the human that is the expression of that contradiction within a sophisticated, exhausted culture, irreducible to synthesis and redemption, which interprets to the very depths – up to the foreboding of self-destruction – the theme of the West, ob-cidere, that is, of that civilisation that carries within itself the seed of its own decline, its own decline.
The proof of this is, in Masini’s work, a lyrical and solemn disintegration of the anthropomorphic figure, mythical or heroic, which touches the consciousness of a moment of full existence and then disintegrates in the same atmosphere that it inhabits, replicating – sometimes even quoting – the modalities that Giotto’s prototype of the angels in the Lamentation of the Christ in Padua have perfectly explained: rushing to the call of an event of pain and humanity, tearing themselves apart in a multiform vocabulary of despair, and finally vanishing, fraying among the whirlwinds, igniting a calm and incandescent air at the same time that consumes what passes through it. Masini’s subjects are always pervaded by physical and psychological tensions: they do not stand still to question the spectator with the enigmatic nature of their gaze, but theatrically ignore him by placing him in the taboo of the fourth wall, overwhelmed by a drama that is consumed entirely in the field of an image that transfigures into an emblem.
It is a process that can only be triggered by being able to rely on the sharing of the cultural keys of myth, through the code of the tradition of the text and the oral tale, where a civilisation recognises itself in the promiscuous and participatory use of the great founding tales of its community.
Masini – like Giotto – emphatically lives the crucial moment in which art became expression, in which it paradoxically sought the transcendental through the narration of human things, of their fleeting materiality elaborated in the only way that man is allowed to, that is through the structure of culture. Even the mixture of his colours testifies to a clear and very strong attachment to the Tuscan tradition that leads from Giotto to Masaccio, even crossing history with that red trace that emphasises the outline of some figures, a key gesture that is by Giotto as well as by the mosaic art of Constantinople. Moreover, Giotto and the Latinization of figuration are once again fundamental to Masini’s profound and recurring re-elaboration of the Greek myth: no longer unflappable and imperturbable, but bent to verisimilitude, accidentality and contrite expression, expedients used as signs of the emergence of the drama and contradiction of the individual that led to the depths of what is irremediable in existence.
In addition to two works on wood – a painting on wood and a stele – which are a sample of the constants and variables in Masini’s work, the exhibition includes the entire cycle on paper L’uomo nel vento (The Man in the Wind), which the artist created in 2009 on commission from Aniello Ertico, President of the Porta Cœli Foundation, as an illustration – or rather, a poetic participation – for the book of the same name that Ertico published in the same year for Osanna Edizioni. Nineteen original paintings of various subjects, all belonging to Antonio Masini’s perennial and recurring repertoire, are brought together on this occasion to celebrate the happiest parabola of the master’s career. There is as much myth and tragedy in them as there is the cyclical and imperturbable sense of time of the deepest rural culture. It is not Arcadia, however, nor Olympus that is involved: it is an anonymous land of the atrocious and ungenerous south, full of clues and omens, in which tumult is just around the corner but the changing of the seasons is at the same time harbinger of the secret of rebirth and the mystery of a necessary and ineluctable death, all intolerable aspects of life that man transfigures into myth to draw from it divine teachings and laws. Masini, in the wake of Ertico’s poetic texts, recounts here, between the lines, an ancestral Basilicata that is impossible to unravel, mystical and secret, the same Basilicata that was the subject of Carlo Levi’s observations on peasant ethics, vertiginously outside of history, or Ernesto de Martino’s anthropological magic practices, or the landscape that becomes sibylline, traitorous and emblematic in Gabriele Salvatores’ I’m Not Scared or Brunello Rondi’s Il demonio. Masini belongs to a season that nevertheless strongly rejected “levism”, that tendency to linger in painting of a similar-realist stamp that seemed necessarily to characterise Lucanian painting from the Second World War onwards. But he also rejects the extraordinary peasant socialist rhetoric of, for example, Luigi Guerricchio, an illustrious Renato Guttuso of Matera ancestry. In Masini, on the other hand, the image is always the occasion for a revelation, the means of access to a mysterious level, not so much for the sake of the sophistication of artistic discourse, but to keep himself strongly anchored to self-reflection on the human through recourse to the devices of cultural writing. This allows him, for example, as a critical and active person in society, to refuse to use art in the service of party doctrines, just as it allows him, as a man animated by the practice of doubt, to work very often in the sphere of the sacred, where he feels the subsidence of that mythological root that is able to speak of the invariants of the human. If we want to use Giotto’s images once again, it is simple and enlightening to imagine a parallel, for example, with The Vision Of The Chariot Of Fire or The Expulsion of the Devils from Arezzo, in the Stories Of Saint Francis of Assisi, in which Francis becomes the mythical figure, capable of wonders, of opening up to the rules of the divine, and the image makes it possible to compose the material of a solemn revelation, of a gash in reality that is as terrible as it is articulated in terms of realism, in the flesh of men.
His works, often accompanied by lyrical and sometimes insistently poetic titles, in this case recall the same spirit as Ertico’s verses, from which they quote passages precisely. They reflect an intimist spirit that opens up to the panic, the universal and the eternal. Heroic epic and rustic frugality, the landscape connects with the human being and becomes the expression and reason for his psychological structures, his erotic impetus, his prohibitions and his remorse. There is always, in Ertico as in Masini, a way of planting his gaze at the bottom of reality, of challenging the abyss of the unspeakable and engaging in a very dangerous duel with it, played with the infinitesimal weapons of the poetic, in search of that magical joint that defeats the inconsistency of the banal, or the profound lack of meaning of the everyday, or the vertigo that laps at the depths of the inexplicability of life.