At the show with the artist: Claudia Losi visits Pontormo, with some lenses and a sentimental guide
The 25th talent contributing to our section “At the show with the artist”, a section inspired by the seminal group of writings published by Pierre Schneider in 1967 under the title “Les Dialogues du Louvre”, is Claudia Losi, who was born 1971 and currently is based in Piacenza. She is the kind of artist who is mostly interested in revealing the lyrical side of small things, experiences, people, or places, in order to provide artistic evidence of their internal monumental nature. It is the case, for instance, of her recent project dedicated to St Kilda archipelago, in Scotland (How do I imagine being there?, Collezione Maramotti and Humbolt Books, 2016), or of the small embroidered globe that is currently part of the exhibition W. Women in Italian Design at La Triennale in Milan (Terre non emerse, 2001). In both cases details play a pivotal role turning objects and materials into artefacts keeping track of a poetic human labour. Kindly accepting our proposal, and coherently responding to our enquiry around the conceptual side of the art from the past centuries, she decided to pay a visit to the Florentine Church of Santa Felicita, where the masterpiece of the most conceptual among the mannerist painters of the XVI century is preserved.
Where you look at, I look at to look at.
Claudia – Some images can adhere to our eyes. They may keep silent for a long time, and then reappear again when a light, a colour, or the movement of a body operate in our memory by similarity and affinity.
I have wished to go back to Florence for years, to meet the Deposition by Pontormo again. To feel the temperature of the church around the painting, and to lean against the hammered iron gate while forgetting about the human beings teeming just beyond the entrance, on the opposite side of the small square in front of Santa Felicita’s facade.
I thought back on the list of foods and fasts, and on the thighs-heads-wings-garments-angels-clouds of the daily work. I thought back on the cold and warmth, the sickness, the habits that measured the time in the book “Il libro mio”, that Pontormo wrote between 1554 and 1556. The images he gave us are themselves nourishment for us, and they still deal with our life and with the enigma that accompany us to the world.
I’ve asked to Mauro, my husband, to join me, so that we could see together.
It is nice to look at a painting with someone who knows how to use the eyes and speaks the words needed to tell about the feeling that arises from observing. I’ve asked him some trigger questions that I don’t report here, but that derive from the enlargements that I’ve isolated by putting some lenses on a reproduction of the “Deposizione” from an hard cover book, and from the places partially reflected onto them.
Mauro – This painting brings along a slow music, as if what we see would be plunged into water. Everything seems to be moved by a cycle of concentric waves. We see a place where a sort of alternative gravity is active, with no architectural features certifying it. The waves follow an elliptical pattern, they diverge and converge. Every circle establishes an orbit, and then another, and so on in order to draw a certain amount of constellations. This happens into the water that, here, meets many, many light.
The orthogonal lines disappeared, deactivated. The eyes of each character, its gaze, rule this absence. The boys carrying the body of Jesus are looking for the world that exists outside the painting. What they see is behind our imagination. It seems that Pontormo is leaving that place, the painted world. The diagonal lines that come out from the eyes follow different orbits, each one is slow, each one plunged into its own water, a deep sea of a natural brightness.
Above the reclined head of Jesus Christ there is a second one, of a woman – turned toward Maria- whose hand grasps Jesus left arm. Her headgear indicates a repetitive movement affecting Jesus’ body, that same body putted into the world by the gazes of the boys supporting him, while his left hand is still blessing and the right one protecting, hands holding other hands.
Each part of the body activates a plot. Slowly articulated words. Dyed skin. Dresses not to hide, but to bring colours. Speaking according to human light. The sky exists also underwater, the sky and all its metamorphosis that are impossible to be told and therefore are divine. It seems April’s light that one I would like to tell about.
And the colours are transparent pulses. They move toward shades becoming more and more intense, or they vanish into the aquatic light. They show themselves as the description of an identity. The necessary path to reach it in order to be yourself, for a short time, in a moment of light.
Also the words, in this picture, seem to be on a path. They pass from the sky to the ground. They are passing through a silent and we, beholders, find ourselves in front of a gap, or a transit space: Somehow everything has already been said elsewhere, nevertheless, everything is still to be said. A huge, countless, number of words are still to be spoken by each of us, as if it were the first time. They are the words carried by the infinite humankind. It is eternal as the Creator who gives himself, as bread, to the world.
All of this takes place thanks to many bright enigmas and to some improbable but truthful lights. The divine light arrives everywhere, and is originated everywhere. The worldly optics are not enough.
Only the eyes of Jesus Christ are turned to the sky, but they are closed. Now he is into the world.
October 26, 2022
