Galerie Vidal-Saint Phalle

 

15 mars – 30 avril 2008           

 

Erwin Bohatsch

 

 

6 mai – 27 mai                       

 

Tony Bevan – Tiphaine Popesco- Vincent Bioulès

 

 

29 mai – 5 juillet           

 

Pierre Tal Coat- Albert Ràfols-Casamada- Jürgen Partenheimer 

 

 

Communiqué de Presse

Pizzi Cannella    Almanacco

 

19 janvier-26 février 2008

 

 

La galerie Vidal-Saint Phalle expose du 19 janvier au 26 février 2008

 Almanacco, ensemble d’œuvres récentes sur papier de même format (80 x 60 cm) de Piero Pizzi Cannella.

Dans cette exposition à la galerie (où Pizzi Cannella expose depuis 1990),

l’artiste romain présente un  florilège des images et des thèmes sur lesquels il a travaillé ces dernières années : fiori secchi ,  solitario mio ,  bagno turco , ombra cinese , camera d’artista  etc…

L’exposition permet de mesurer ainsi l’étendue du registre iconographique de Pizzi Cannella, et la variété des thèmes abordés.

Cette exposition rend également bien compte du travail de l’artiste qui, s’il est toujours figuratif, aborde la figuration à travers le prisme du souvenir et avec la mémoire du temps qui passe.

La force de ces images - souvent mentales – la matière très présente de ces œuvres sur papier nous incitent à en dépasser le charme ou la nostalgie pour en saisir la dimension contemporaine.

Comme l’écrit Cesare Biasini Selvaggi dans l’importante monographie consacrée à Pizzi Cannella  (Editions du XXIème siècle, 2006) : « Si dans l’œuvre de Pizzi Cannella, le dessin est un langage autonome et parallèle à la peinture…ces dernières années Pizzi Cannella s’est mis à superposer ces deux langages ».

 

Principales expositions de musées :

1991 Museo Civico di Gibellina

1997 Spedale di Santa Maria della Scala

1999 Espace d’art contemporain André Malraux, Colmar

2001 Museo Archeologico Regionale, Aoste

2003 Centro Internazionale d’arte contemporeano, Genazzano

2004 Hôtel des Arts, Toulon

2006 Museo d’arte contemporaneo (MACRO) et Villa Médicis, Rome

 

• Gazette de l’Hotel Drouot, 7 décembre 2007

L’artiste danois Per Kirkeby n’en finit pas de démontrer son amour immodéré et revendiqué pour la peinture. Cela nous vaut un ensemble d’une grande coherence stylistique et expressive. Dès les années soixante, Kirkeby a recours a un panneau de bois industriel utilisé à la fabrication de bibliothèque bon marché, appellé “masonite”. Affectionnant le format carré depuis toujours, il découpe un panneau de 122 x 122 cm et s’empare de cet espaces pour y peindre un paysage mental. Ces fragments fonctionnent individuellement et par polarité, se lisant comme des pages d’un journal. Nous croyons reconnaître une image de la nature, évocation arborée ou minerale pour laquelle l’huile et le crayon gras se mêlent avec energie. Structurée, defrichée avec une autorité qui ne laisse pas décrypter comme un ideogramme. Simultanement distancée et familiére, la toile se prête au vagabondage comme à la contemplation. Un exercice romantique indissociable de celui qui consiste à regarder une peinture dans l’attente d’une evasion. Sur des fonds noirs, la couleure ménage des atmosphères crepusculaires avec des bleus et des ocres rehaussés de traces rouges. L’oeil butine, s’attarde, distanc ie l’analyse. Des souvenirs émergent de ce qui semble être des apparences et qui demeurent des sédiments de notre univers.

• Télerama 12 décembre 2007

Toujours à la limite de la figuration, ses oeuvres possedent un caractère secret et presque mysterieux. Il faut donc un peu de temps à l’oeil pour, comme une foret dense, entrer dans cette belle suite de tableaux carrés que l’artiste danois nomme “Masonites” et qui sont realisées sur des panneaux de bois industriel : fond noir, stries de falaises, noeuds de branches, signes et applats jetés de craies jaunes soufre ou vert lumineux. A 70 ans, Per Kirkeby, l’un des plus beaux peintres de notre époque, surprend par son audace et sa maturité.

• Le Monde Samedi 24 novembre 2007

Per Kirkeby aime peindre sur des carrés de masonite- panneaux de bois industriel - de 122 cm de côté. Depuis les années 1960, l’artiste pratique regulièrement sur ce support, tout en travaillant par ailleurs sur de plus grandes toiles. Kirkeby le maitrise donc admirablement et en tire toutes sortes d’effets. Couvrant et découvrant le bois, jouant de l’opacité et de la transparence, du raclage et du dessin, il compose des morceaux choisis de nature. On y reconnaît souvent souches et arbres, plus rarement rocs et eaux. Sa serie la plus recente se distingue par des fonds noirs et gris sombres, sur lesquels les tracés colorés font naitre des paysages. Elle compte plusieurs reussites très seduisantes.

• Extraits du “Livre d’or”

1. Interressante découverte j’aime découvrir le talent de cette scandinavie ou j’ai vecu et qui n’en regorge pas!
2. C’est toujours avec jubilation que je découvre et redécouvre les strates peintes des paysages mentaux de ce grand peintre et sculpteur, un de mes preferés !
3. Beneath the night, crying in the dark is something savage ! Why not ? Grendel ! For all the elegance of drawring which reigns supreme, it still comes down to something clawed, clawing it’s way to the surface ! Something which may sleep comfortably in this night - but awakes with screams. A true torch carrier for his culture. A one and only.

 

 

    19 january- 26 february 2008      

Pommidoro, an unquiet love

 

‘I am not on earth to help my admirers cross the road.’

Antonio Lobo Antunes, Book of Canticles, III

 

Alas, when I was a boy, was I not minded as I am today?

Or why, minded as I am, to I not once again have perfect cheeks.’

Horace, Odes

 

This morning again I was hanging around in Via del Corso in Rome, grazing on shop windows, on my way to lunch with Pizzi at Pommidoro, doing everything I could to be late, thinking that out of all these cities that have become the same – the miles of shops selling women’s shoes, I mean, what is it about women and shoes? – Rome is the one that has resisted most successfully. There is a kind of detachment and irony about Rome that saves the place from absolute vulgarity. 

But with Pizzi one is never late, because he himself is often late, and later than late. Like, I’ve known him to be a whole day late. With Pizzi the hours of lateness are beads in a rosary that you tell off at every meeting and time goes slowly like a boat on the sea.

‘Don’t worry, order some wine. I recommend the Orvieto. I’m not feeling too good but, ok, I’ll be with you, in an hour, an oretta, or if you prefer when he can see each other tonight at home with friends, this morning with the southerly wind, the sirocco that has just got up, yes, I’m still in Ischia but I’m taking the first boat, I’ll be there as soon as the wind dies down, in Rome it’s too hot, start, eat, non ti preoccupare.’

Not that he himself can so blithely bear the lateness of others, but then great artists are surrounded by a host of courtiers, flatterers and other hangers-on. That is why, as Pizzi says, ‘everyone dreams of being an artist’, and here he is whistling sonorously and starting up the old Neapolitan song:

Vide o mare quant’e bello

Spira tanto sentimento

Comme tu chi tiene a mente

Ca scetato o faie sunna

Bravo Pizzi, bravo maestro!

And all around me and I myself, too, as one man:

Cicerenella mia, si’ dolce e bella !

Cicerenella tenéa nu ciardino

e ll’adacquava cu ll’acqua e lu vino….

We gallerists, too, are under an obligation to our artists. Half lackey out of love, half parasites or devotees, and at the same time family men, too.

So, I get to Pommidoro half an hour late. The owner, superbly oblivious to my identity for twenty years now, leaves me to find my way to Pizzi’s table, the table in the corner proudly sporting the restaurant’s only ‘riservato’ plaque. I sit down with my book, ready for the ritual ordeal of waiting for Pizzi, but as I do so I am suddenly overcome with the desire not to wait this time, with the wish just for once to see Pizzi joyously rush in, come up with a big smile – ‘da tanta tempo no ci vediamo!’ – and crush me with one of those big Roman hugs I’ve seen him lavish on his friends.

I would like us to launch together into a dazzling conversation about art and poetry, which would be such a change from his grunts and my silences: ‘What an extraordinary Brice Marden show that was at MoMA!’ I would say, and he would tell me that he is rereading Dante, and we’d never have to talk about his esoteric accounting in my traveller’s Italian, or about the price of his paintings, which he always finds

‘too low, Vida, ridiculously low.’

‘But in relation to what, low in relation to what, Pizzi?’

or about the paintings he promised but forgot to make, making me want to go into the studio and finish these bloody sodding paintings, except that talent isn’t contagious and you can’t catch it over lunch.

But Pizzi does eventually arrive, reluctantly, and on his way over to me, he stops at a table of regulars, racing paper under his arm and cyclist’s cap on his head, mechanically starting up for the umpteenth time an excited discussion about Roma.

‘At the last, the very last… in the last handful of seconds, one of those stonking shots, eh, Pizzi, mate?!’

‘Totti, what a crook!’

‘When he starts playing ball….’

‘Trouble is, the brute doesn’t often want to play.’

Leaving me and my earnestness to nibble grissini.

In Pizzi’s paradise artists are in the choir of angels, closer to God even than the Archangels with their peacock wings covered in sapphires and diamonds, closer than the armed and armoured Thrones, or the severe Dominations; the artists are on God’s lap. One evening, when a whole group of us, Pizzi’s gang, were coming out of the casino in Enghien, half-drunk – I wouldn’t recommend it to you: awful place, pale lighting and cardboard foyer, whores just off the tables, hieratic in their black dresses, wax hands clasping their bags, and all those frenzied faces pressing round the games – Pizzi’s assistant, who carries with such aplomb the sweet name of Veronica told me, in her best Strada tones, on the steps of that same casino: ‘Pizzi has a pure heart’. And from that confidence came my revelation.

In Enghien I did not see Pizzi with his white shirt hanging out dragging his raucous band in the wake of his aura and munificence, no, I saw Pizzi taking slow and hesitant steps under the milky way of his redemption:

Pizzi rises at around noon, lunches, spends the afternoon playing cards, dealing with business, dines at home, then goes to the studio at 11 in the evening, rising with the first rays of dawn, dozing off to the noise of the street, at the hour when mothers holding their children’s hands are taking them to school.

At night, when the night is black and blue, and the moon sometimes hangs like a balloon from the studio, and the city goes into a huddle, sinking slowly into the ground, he paints the somnolence of Rome, the slumbering palazzi, the noise of rain on closed blinds, the empty balconies. He paints the beautiful dresses lined up in the dark wardrobes and the balls winding down in the light of sparkling chandeliers. He paints all those nocturnal festivities that as a child one images from the outside, and in the morning when the sun rises he paints the shells picked up on the seashore, one bright as agate, the other blood-coloured, the mysteriously crumpled grasses on the dunes and the lizard skittering from the noise of passers-by.

I was alone last night in Rome, at Pizzi’s place.

On his easel he had a painting of a black iron chair lost against a great white ground, that magnificent Spanish white, the black lines of the chair in twisted metal on the white, falsely flat surface, a painting he called his ‘solitare mio’.

In his spacious studio, gigantic paintings on the wall, dark cathedrals rising skywards, piles of stretchers and unused canvases in the corridors, and leading on to other rooms full of boxes and models – Pizzi’s studio smells of the blast furnace, of machinery. You can hear the echo of the din of pistons.

‘I should write poetry, it’s less tiring’, Pizzi told me, and we went to the restaurant. We stood for a long while on the terrace outside.

It was cognac time.

‘I’m still waiting for a papal commission!’ said Pizzi, his nose in his cognac.

As for me, my plane was leaving early in the morning.

But at two in the morning, in summer, in Rome, it’s like the middle of the evening. Superb girls walking past, artists, friends. Everyone knows everyone else. There was youth on every face. The most beautiful city in the world was looking at itself and time was standing still.

A young artist, straight nose and curly hair, came up and greeted Pizzi.

‘So, you’re still a conceptual artist?’

‘But Pizzi, you always told me one must think,’ said the artist. His name was Marco.

‘But you think too much… nowadays everyone wants to be a conceptual artist!’ said Pizzi. He was drawing on the paper tablecloth and the coffee stain on the cloth became, at the nonchalant tip of his spoon, an amphora, shadowgraphs.’

When Marco had left: ‘It’s always war between artists’, he told me. And, as I was rising to my feet, ‘You’re not going to bed, Vidal, what are you doing? It’s not worth it now.’

I walked back to my hotel, not my usual hotel in San Lorenzo, but a hotel near the Pantheon. On the walls of Rome, in the half-light of the streets, the dark ochre of the façades showed images that trembled in the lamplight – vases, mother-of-pearl-ish shells, shadows outlined with soot, traces of delight sketched by fingers on the roughcast, a silhouette hidden in the opening of a palazzo doorway – Pizzi’s painting followed my footsteps, pursued me with its nostalgia. But it was past three in the morning, it was late and so the hotel was closed. I banged on the door, I rang to wake up the watchman, and was about to wearily lie down to kip on the ground when, luckily, along came a carabiniero.

‘I’m sorry, but I can’t manage to wake up the night watchman.

‘Sir’, the carabiniero courteously replied, ‘this is not a hotel. It’s a bank.’ And he took me by the arm and, like a true gentlemen, escorted me to my hotel.

Later I told Pizzi what happened. How he laughed.

At Pommidoro, meanwhile, time was getting on.

While I was waiting, I spread a bit of salt on the tablecloth, an oblong pile. I wanted to make a pretty shell in all the shades of grey and white on the cloth, but all I ended up with was a pile of salt between the glass and the plate.

At home in Paris I have a drawing Pizzi gave me, a sketch, hardly more than a mark.

On an ivory-white sheet, the handsome rag paper that goes by the pretty name of carta inglese, in the bottom left, a little cobalt-blue shell and its shadow, edging forward like an inland sea on the paper, a pale sea with absent shores, and underneath Pizzi has written, ‘una giornata al mare, è pur sempre una giornata al mare’.

 

(‘Journal’, excerpts)[/lang_en]

 

 

Whether archaic or downgraded, has the figure of the painter become so inestimable that it is unable or no longer knows how to assert its values? To put the question in this way is, the reader will agree, paradoxical. First of all, because it rather sardonically appears, of course, at the front of a catalogue reproducing the recent paintings of Danish artist Per Kirkeby, thus demonstrating that there remains something present and intense – a love between the artist and his public (if one can use that term for those who come to look at the works in a gallery or museum). Secondly, because if this confession of incapacity regarding any definitive judgement about the ‘matter of painting’ seems to embarrass, why insist on linking art and a certain empathy from the world?

Per Kirkeby has supplied his own answer to this question: ‘The art of painting’, he writes, ‘is obviously both incredibly naïve and cynical at the same time. Naïve, because there is no honest or obvious reason to smear diluted pigment over a piece of fabric or some other support. And cynical, because a painting does not concern itself with the destruction of the world. Even a painting representing the Last Judgement and the souls being transported to hell is underpinned not by worry but by realism. That is the way it is. The destruction of the world is inherent in the fact of painting a picture.’

It is a lucid remark: whatever its invention, a painting carries with it a degree of impotence that fortifies it, and the artist claims not only to be its source but also its marvelling commentator. Hence the idea so often expressed by Kirkeby himself, that, among modern movements, painting remains a place of hypotheses more than of preaching.

This elegance and relative distance inform everything done by this artist, and we can sense his tenacious, almost furious determination to be involved with the business of the world. We know that he has combined many different activities, performing with real verve the roles of painter, sculptor, writer, architect, filmmaker and geologist. But we also know that at the same time, through his silences and through his paintings, he has asserted a certain detachment in the name of dream and self-effacement.

An activist in exile, a rigorous and romantic man of the North who declines that identity, Kirkeby pursues his ambition. To be a painter in this age that calls on everyone to be efficient, in a hurry and profitable, is to take refuge in that closed, immobile and old-fashioned place represented by both the studio and the painting. It is, as they say, to insist: for example, to keep on painting on Masonite, that industrial wood used to make cheap bookshelves that the young Kirkeby began working with in the 1960s, because that was all he could afford. Or again, to have always – but not exclusively – painted on the practical but unconventional square format of 122 by 122 centimetres. By means of these seemingly limiting methods, Per Kirkeby does his sowing and reaping. He puts down his suggestions of images, charts nocturnal atmospheres, brings forth sprouting light blues and sooty ochres, lays down shadows, starts clearing his brambly lines, and so on. In his work the picture remains that secret and contemplative object whose inward liveliness is, strangely enough, always active within the images. And if his painting refers to the landscape, to the melancholy of a Northern School (a term and category that he finds deeply irritating), or if it signals more than it designates, it always seems to opt for a subtle abandon. But, the moment we consider these paintings with empathy, the impossibility of defining the real is countered by a marvellous feeling of an intimate conversation that embraces or embarrasses the gaze. Places of survival or modest resistance that the eye grasps over time: painting is only the haunted memory of the world’s recollection and, at the same time, of our very fragile lives.

Laurent Boudier