ENCOUNTERS
Bruno Corà
The following is intended
as short account of a few encounters auspicious to the exhibition of Paolo
Gubinelli’s work.
Some time ago, on a noisy,
festive Roman evening like those in Leopardi’s village, I happened to
see Maria Luisa Spaziani between the Spanish Steps and nearby Largo
Mignanelli, a passer-by among the many, yet solitary at the same time. Evidently engrossed in her own
thoughts while performing one of the infinite number of her daily routines,
she made me realize how utterly extraneous my stare was to her life. In fact, I mastered my desire to
attempt an encounter, to interrupt her stroll even momentarily, under the
circumstances. I was left
with the simple but vivid image of the poetess on an ordinary day of her
life.
To the contrary, it
happened one rainy evening in Florence that I found myself climbing into a
car with Maurizio Cucchi, thanks to someone who had offered us a ride to
our hotel in Piazza Ognissanti following the opening of an art exhibition
in which his participation consisted in hanging one of his poems on the
wall to accompany the work of an artist.
The occasion gave the poet a chance to complain about a lady
admirer who had insistently tried to engage him in conversation during the
opening. The episode had
profoundly irritated him and his justified outburst during the trip
between the via Porcellana gallery and the Grand Hotel was a clear sign of
his agitation.
My encounters with Luzi
and Orengo, while different, took place while we were seated in front of
an audience for readings of their poems.
It was an atmosphere of serene and intelligent confrontation, but
the sound of their poetry, of their voices, kept us from discussing the
works of art which we all felt deeply should have been discussed had the
circumstances been otherwise. Luzi
accepted my invitation to come to Prato, to the Centro di Arte
Contemporanea, and once there spent a generous amount of time visiting the
rooms of the Museum and,
later, in a debate held in the library.
I ran into Orengo again, whom I had met previously in Turin thanks
to Giulio Paolini, a mutual friend, at the Brunnenburg Castle when we were
both guests of Mary de Rachewilz, Ezra Pound’s daughter. I was there to introduce Pound’s
poetry in terms of its implications in an admirable new work by Claudio
Parmiggiani called A Lume Spento
in honor of the poet. And,
then again, on many other precious occasions.
The impact with Cesare
Vivaldi, other than on a personal level, often took place on the pages of
publications of art criticism, but also those regarding his work as a poet. Gifted with a measured and pacific
eloquence, his discreet, well-meaning smile left a great margin of
potential for everything and, certainly not fatalistic, it expressed the
tolerance owed to his knowledge and wisdom.
A witness to art who, together with very few others, I have always
considered credible.
These few words, dedicated
above all to those I physically grazed over the course of my work, in no
way exhaust an active memory, wide open to other future encounters such as
those already initiated with other poets, the authors of other poems
tenaciously collected by Paolo Gubinelli.
My own are, therefore,
only simple recollections quickly delineated in order to avoid wasting the reader’s time and
space, and therefore they are pretexts.
Just as Gubinelli’s own drawings are mercurial multicolor
depictions for facilitating an intermingling of variously gifted muses. As for the deus ex machina of this highly
original series, among the numerous considerations and thoughts about
Gubinelli’s watercolors and etchings, we need to take a particular look
at those horizontal surges, those expansive chromatic washes traversed by
gestures sometimes diagonal, sometimes synodical, or else intersecting
like rain or wind in vaporous, conflicting progression. His skies, as buoyant as poems, or his symmetrical lacustrine
moors where one can imagine the turbulence of a Turner or the dilated
luminosity of a Rothko. These
are the acts of each and every author today who all share ties, who allow
us to suppose their secret but mutual understanding:
There is a common horizon
shared by painting and
poetry
an infinite but completed
circular line where
ut
pictura poiesis
and viceversa
domain of bewitchment.
Bruno Corà
Rome, March 2003
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