Morandi ; The Italian Master of Still Lives                            By Giuseppe Marasco

Lines of Poetry.

Open Til 28 April

The Cheshire cat, Smiles through out, this exhibition. Morandi, the essentialist, shares a sibling similitude with those masters of the singular; Gericult, studying cadavers to produce his great masterpiece the raft of the Medusa, Hiroshige, his 36 views of Mount Fuji, Cezanne and his mountain. Morandi made his epic from the small. Returning again and again with ever greater depth and insight. Here the sublime is a small thing, happening in small things. Bucking the standard conceptualisations of the sublime. Everything is hesitation, or a fearless letting in ever more, ever a recorded fear and trembling. Like the captured heat vectors of an intense sun. Perhaps we can think of Morandi’s production of etchings in the frame of a visual Diary, or review of attentions collated. Grasping lines, ever reading more into them. Widening what meaning and content that can be carried between, each line, seeing more within those empty spaces. Recorded perceptual Shifts, to the furthest limits of matter, composition, complexities and subtle variations. With its fascination for borders and edges, humble objects are made mesmerizing and vital. Morandi brings an uncanny intelligence and a psychological thrill in the encounter with every still life, and every landscape. So possessed of life, one thinks Morandi is a scientist of the uncanny, and of wonder. Capable, here in this work of prolonged ‘shinning’ of this special encounter. In his hands we are reminded all objects are uncanny, not just surrealist objects. For the Japanese, objects collect energy until, their 100th year, they believe an object has collected enough, that they gain, personality. It is as if Morandi has tapped into that energy.

There are different kinds of Silence in Morandi’s work. The quietness and stillness embodied in the objects, to the silence within of emergent thought, and the unique silences of the differing emergent qualities of mind.

Reality, becomes pleasure, as the viewer moves from an encounter with a screen of sameness to a game of perceptual hide and seek, of attentions and duree. Time and consciousness, aware, measuring a moment, it is gone. Time is mobile and incomplete, here it is attempted in immobile, complete lines. Morandi, explores the inner life of man, it’s particular kind of duration. The prints are neither a unity nor a quantitative multiplicity. They illustrate something of the duration of their observation, duration is ineffable and can only be shown indirectly through images that can never reveal a complete picture. While for science it always remains the same.

Capturing, consciousness, attention itself, wave like, Shimmering. To Capture it like a ghost, like the dancing wind in fields of wheat. it is as fantastic as that. One thinks of a remarkable discipline of observation. Letting the image\object emerge. Observing, failing attention and journeying consciousness to its furthest limits, and then going over with it. This is as much a portrait of a man, a mind. Grasping the intangible.

The artist Martin Shortis notes; that drawing is an argument with the piece of paper and reality itself. Here in these etchings, the argument shows clear signs of being a sensorial portrait, as well as that of a mind. The irreality of the immaterial objects.

Odd quiddity of everything (things, their frame of time and our presence are really more plastic than we suppose, do we not really have to be thinking of time, and attention. a sequence of time, utterly trivial.

The line of concentration in these etchings, is like the golden thread charting out, seeking to deepen, the self-examined real of conscious phenomena, plumbing, plunging ever deeper.

Morandi is interesting for this extra dimension in his work of observing, time, distance, duration and experiential depth. Seeing where we are on the canvas then, looking back and discovering all that more in the object, seeing what only prolonged

observation can, the sense aported is that of leafing through chapters, of detail, marshaled onto a single pictorial plane.

These 75 prints, (half the total 150 oeuvre), with their network like, meshes, are like finding little atlases. Perhaps of language and the uncanny. Attached to an object. The space, and the time for it to unfold. Let it be recorded. It is edifying to realise such heroic lengths, exist to be pursued. Morandi discovered the expanse of this territory. Thoughts shade on his metaphysical painting, how his landscapes affected his thoughts in relation to this. These keen observations of a life time, these atlases. Ought to be keenly seized upon as one of the best apprenticeships of sense and mind, found anywhere.

It is inspiring that he maintained that inner projection, imagining a Herculean concentration, attending to these small immaterial interior and exterior objects. One suspects Morandi, kept things simple, to remain in taut contact, with that sensibility. If he was a Chef, his secret would be quality ingredients well prepared, allowed to come through on their own. And you would notice the trace of every single little thing.

With exacting observations of the world – outside as well as the interior life, – producing something altogether new, happens.

Is it there? Things seem to melt in to the background, or even dematerialize in the foreground, as the Italian sun so easily makes us forget the difference of the outside and inside of the body, so easily melting the difference between public and private. That is so much of the openness of the Italian character. Which also provides for the reception of the things and affects to enter more easily. It’s an affect abundant in Morandi’s work at large. The etchings, with the technique of hatching, are provided spaces or gaps. These are incredibily apt, as absence\presence\openness and void are, all the more there as subject.

Morandi’s still lives at once, still lives but not. This It is portraiture of the mind and the soul. It’s works , it capacities for attentions and its wanings. It movement, quirks, alighting and playfulness. The duration and length of its will. Lengthened as much as possible.

This concern with mind, geist, remain as portals, to a duration. Providing assess to moments of thought which are so fleeting, fragile, easily forgotten or lost and difficult to defend from the everyday intrusions of our other thoughts. In this way, the prints really seem Memento Vitae, than Memento Mori, recalling us to the renewing action of really being there in the moment, thinking and sensing reflection on ones own faculties. No moment can really ever be the same, so infinite so rich are the cognitive processes.

So arresting, so rare, to have these little inklings, evidenced. Perceived clues, easily passed over, that are naturally, emergent of man and mind. This mode of seeing seems to have been part of so much more an ancient way.

With Morandi we are remind of what it is to have the mental habit to Carry around certain forms, and what it means existentially and qualitatively to carry around with yourself these kinds of emblems, treasures and memories. Objects in which their makings and content are transparent, discernible and additive.

The dabs in the different Mordani’s. Pauses. Pausing speeds. Causing thought.

But also feels like putting fingers into the image. (sensitising of senses.)

the smallest thing becomes radial. seen through the crack of the doorway, out on to this immense space. reduced a bit, opens so much more. such control possible of one .

And with the hand, handedness holding the image or better, the objects holds, rotates.

This in-between speed or materials, textures, more sub-ghostly, wake like.

A bit like memory, a node, atmosphere.

They a remain a mystery, Open ended containers, vessels of thought, as Sister Wendy Beckett would put it.

These immaterial objects, theses happenings of mind. Here like little maps, Portals to them. Punctums.

http://www.estorickcollection.com/exhibitions/