About Presence and Representation: Recalcati.
Francesco Dama
Qual è colui che forse di Croazia
viene a veder la Veronica nostra,
che per l’antica fame non sen sazia,
Dante Alighieri, Divina Commedia, Paradiso, XXXI, 103 – 105
Strangely enough, in the work of artists known to be nonbelievers we can often discern analogies with a content that could rightfully be defined as spiritual, at times even of striking intensity. This is how the isolated figures in contemplation of the Crucifixion appear in the demure chapter house of the former convent of Santa Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi, now not easy to visit, the author of which was described by Vasari as “a man of very little religion”.
The contemplative attitude of those saints frescoed by Perugino, completely immersed in a mystical aura, clashes to no small degree with the portrait of the artist proposed in the Vite: a man with a “head of granite”
much more concerned with worldly goods, and houses in particular, than with the salvation of the soul.
On a first analysis, some of Recalcati’s early paintings have a similar air, in which the most mundane articles of clothing – socks, underwear, t-shirts – are impressed in the fresh pigment almost like an ostention. Alain Jouffroy identified this aspect when he wrote about reliques,
although he was concerned to divert the reader of those paintings from any kind of transcendental interpretation: “for Recalcati who lives in atheism like a fish in water, art is never a pretext for finding a way into transcendence.”
The artist’s most interesting production – possibly with the exception of the New York experience in the 80s – is that conducted on the theme of the imprint. The important role that such works, dating to the end of the 1950s, played within an artistic culture dominated at the time by abstract art has already been extensively underscored.
Recalcati contributes to the reintroduction of the human figure into artistic research in an entirely individual manner, using the imprint on the canvas of his own body and his own garments.
Unaware of what was going on in France at the time, where the poetics of the Nouveau Réalisme were stirring into life,
the artist created a peinture de la decèption pure,
composed of the muted colours of the earth, black and desperate matter. A painting of failure, according to Jouffroy,
which is the result of a constant conflict with painting itself; yet, despite this, Recalcati starts painting again, every time, from the beginning. And so, with the paintings, the years too pass: the artist inserts a narrative intention mingled with sensations derived from the now insistent pop culture, sets up a comparison with the concept of death, throws opens the gaze on the window of a New York loft overlooking a basketball pitch, letting in the breeze of American realism; he abandons painting and encounters pottery, rediscovers his early works.
Recalcati’s latest works are a revisitation of the imprints with which he made his name on the art scene at the age of just twenty (gaining the admiration of, among others, Jacques Prévert and Dino Buzzati). The artist rediscovers the poetic component of the origin, mediated by the awareness matured over years of research, proving how innate to his sensitivity is a cultural trope of such intensity as that of the imprint.
Recalcati’s paintings speak a language that is as old as the first creative impulse of man, when he felt the supreme need to impress the image of his own hand upon the rock. They explore the complex relation between absence and presence, harking back to the temporal relationship detected by Benjamin in the Has-been and the Now [Jetzt].
The imprint boasts a singular ontology: it certifies a presence, a happening which, following Barthes,
has-been, following a path that we could define per absentia, albeit maintained in an eternal present. It constantly states the referent (which is the impressed body, in this case the artist himself) without ever clarifying it. According to the astute definition of Georges Didi-Huberman, this is “something that speaks to us both of contact (the foot sinking into the sand) and of loss (the absence of the foot in the footprint); something which expresses both the contact of loss and the loss of contact.”
The artist’s activity moves within a similar dialectic, generating problematic forms, at times unexpected, open. This is the meaning of the unsteady faces impressed in Recalcati’s colour: they are denied identities, whispered rather than declared, almost as if certifying the impossibility of reaching the goal.
The bodies transferred to canvas subsist upon a magnificent contradiction: they appear to be explored down to the tiniest wrinkle, to the extent that we are led to think of x-rays or of the anatomical waxworks made from similar imprints, but at the same time they elude any attempt to release them from their disturbing condition, imprisoned in the painting, distant. Before Recalcati’s work the effect is of a marked alienation, as if we were observing the negative of a facial cast: the laws of perception are overturned.
The canvas is the site of the encounter, of the event, almost a reminiscence of the “arena for action” described by Rosenberg apropos the American action painters,
a site that announces the incorporation into art of the poetics of the body.
Tradition has handed the images of the deities down to us in the form of imprints. The Holy Face, whether impressed upon fabric (the Mandylion, the Holy Shroud) or on clay (Keramion) is an acheiropoieton, the result of a miraculous process whereby the image, obtained by contact, shares the assumptions that hold for the incarnation. For the believer, Veronica’s Veil speaks of “a distance that can be bridged only at the end of time, on the day of Judgement.”
No miracles in the canvases of Recalcati. There is however a sense of distance which is similar, like an awaiting, to that insatiable “antica fame”.
Rome, October 2010