I leave here my invitation to dive head first into the vast pictorial space of Mariannita Luzzati's abstract landscapes, towards the rich and inviting tones of colors, the intriguing nuances of light and shadows and the attractive chords of blue (as in the monochromatic paintings of Danube School).
Perhaps a memorial to our biblical dream of the promised land; or an epitaph to our historic hopes in the conquest of the new world, the primitive Eldorado. A vision only experienced by natives, or the Edenic vision immortalized by romantic European painter-travelers?
There are no ideological impositions in these ‘landscapes’, nor narratives, because what it gives us back is painting. The opaque reality of painting is built in a long and intense process of accumulation of thousands of brushstrokes, in dozens of pictorial layers; highly diluted oil pigments are entirely absorbed by the screen. Each brushstroke is a mark accounted for in the constitution of the pictorial space, but it is distinguished by its economy. For twenty-five years working on these paintings, the artist achieved the mastery of showing the work without highlighting the work.
It is a landscape, but without the classical spatial representation of the Renaissance landscape. Not since modern (and abstract) art have we believed that pictorial space exists in a clear representational relationship with a recognizable three-dimensional space. A path that was paved before by Turner and other impressionist painters exploring atmospheric painting, or even earlier, by romantic painters focusing on the emotional and psychological aspects of space, such as Caspar F. David.
Mariannita's paintings strongly impact us with an immaterial aspect, perhaps because they reveal to us only the indexical presence of a phantasmal image. In her process, she always starts her work with a photograph. The drawing arises from the deconstruction of this photographic image, whether taken by her or borrowed from other ‘ready-made’ sources. The images serve both as a connection to your experience of the world and as inspiration for what the painting could become after the erasure of buildings, people or any other intrusions in the landscape.
In the drawings, the form appears in the lightness of the touch of the graphite that levitates on the paper, creating delicate spots as if painted in subtle shades of gray, even contradicting the intentions of the drawing as a sketch -- for Mariannita they arise from the refinement of the painting; in the engravings the form appears in the imprecision of the polychromy between the diluted planes of the aquatint baths; in oil painting through the chromatic and tonal nuances of the pigment, in the contrast of chiaroscuro, in the passages of light and shadows.
The shapes, in this work, are not defined through lines, nor rigid contours, nor are they given to us immediately. They arise in the intensity of contrasts and luminous vibrations that propagate in the pigments and require us time to appreciate them. The form is just one step away from being completely dissolved in the pictorial space. These ‘bodies’ are singular presences, human silhouettes in a permanent state of appearance. They also make us strange the way they occupy the space, as if they were blurry, dimmish images, or exposed through a camera obscura, just a spectrality.
The artist solves the problem of edges, figure and background, faced in Cézanne's painting, but through a surreal practice of playing with our perception, just as happened in Italian metaphysical painting. At Scuola Metafisica, paintings with a dreamlike atmosphere seek a connection with the unconscious mind, beyond physical reality, hence the name metaphysics. We cannot obliterate the fact that the artist comes from an Italian family, having studied in Italy, and despite having a great passion for nature and the light of the lush tropics, we note that perhaps she shared a vein of Nordic influence on philosophy via modern art. Nietzsche and Schopenhauer were important influences for De Chirico, for example, I think here of the girl who runs with the toy (Mystery and Melancholy in a Street) or the landscapes and still lifes of Morandi (Still Life with Mannequin), works that use optical sensations and impact us with an emotional displacement. Surely the adjectives attributed to that school, such as poetic, evocative, profound, perhaps also fit them?
We cannot fail to mention, when observing the development of the work, that there was a sudden change in the use of colors, or lack thereof in recent years. Since the world literally fell on her head, her color range has become very restricted, particularly an absence of reds. An abrupt withdrawal from the symbolic and expressive function of color, but which now gradually returns in the latest works.
When looking at these paintings we have several options, such as reflecting on our human condition in a predatory relationship with nature; or about the philosophical, historical or institutional condition of the painting; about the studies of R. Barthes and the indexical nature of photography; or we can also simply accept that contemporary painting denies any possibility of self-definition.
The artist does not impose an image of landscape on us, as we have learned to recognize in the history of art; urban landscapes, winter scenes, seascapes or countryside. She works on the conceptual definition of what landscape is or can be, its ontology.
In her own words, these images suggest that the viewer contemplate and reflect on emptiness and silence, which is our greatest need today.
We perceive this invitation as a delicacy. Is Mariannita inviting us to a true meditative encounter with the work to experience the essential silence of the painting?
Text by Paula Terra-Neale. Art Historian, Researcher, Independent Curator and Terra-Arte platform, residing between Portugal and England
