THE CADUCEUS AND THE BOOK
( "Serpent-Wand" )
( The Coming of "The Philosophers" )
The Philosophers’ series which began at the dawn of the 3rd Millennium (after the “I Sedianti” series of the 70s and 80s) is the most homogenous and meaningful “corpus” by Umberto Falchini. This series encompasses and further develops his experiences, acquired during the 80s and 90s - especially those of the “Il Viaggiatore”.
Where infinite and incoherent research once dominated, now Utopia seems to materialise and the destination of wandering both in all its splendour and complexity is reached.
Therefore, reaching your destination doesn’t lead to a feeling of total satisfaction, but to a strong commitment to renewal – the necessity to condense intuition in all its expressive forms, a definite but harmonious regeneration (without remorse or retraction) of the theme.
The revision mechanism in “Il Viaggiatore” originates from a process of self questioning, which is based on a second reading of its intricate life, and a verification of the hierarchy of values that live behind its façade. These values are present and significant despite their apparent lack of evidence. It is a definite self-questioning process that aims to identify a world in which the guiding function is the responsibility of extraordinary and neglected values such as knowledge and thought... in one word, philosophy.
This is not just related to itself, but is slotted into a dialectic relationship with art whose roots are found in the German idealistic thinking (here I am thinking especially about Hegel of the Encyclopaedia) and which also inspired other artists (for example Kosuth and his “Art After Philosophy”). On his part Falchini intended to create something based on the cultural baggage of the Philosophers - a poetically mature world, where thought and knowledge are neither empty concepts nor obligatory and impassable tracks; it is a world so sufficiently undetermined that it can embrace both the real scenarios and the possible ones, and can produce a decisive change in the pictorial work of the artist without renouncing an inalienable continuity of the original concept.
Into this context we find the new art protagonists, the philosophers – our life guides, who are thoughtful, ironic, responsible, childish, sorrowful and scornful – they are winged creatures that fly over the decadent deserts of our time, the abstract purity of the nights, the tautological concentration of the portraits without a backdrop; they are mostly double figures (body/shadow, life/idea, being/not being) that adorn themselves with identifying symbols – the short ancient loop-topped ritual staff that they hold as a “caduceus”, and the book that they are reading or simply holding in their hand – the latter being compact and bound, a modern, cultural point of reference, which is fairly direct, and if we like, ordinary, but, for this very reason, effective and irrefutable. The historical and psychological distance between these two emblems (the first being stylised and sophisticated, the second, common and ordinary) is the demonstration of these characters’ ambiguous and enigmatic nature; they are strong and consistent in the role they fulfil, and childish, indistinct and almost incomplete in the way in which they appear. In the same way the value for which they are witnesses is strong and contradictory in history and in life.
These aspects are particularly evident in the latest series of paper “tempera” paintings, which concentrate on these characters, lightening if not nullifying the landscape’s intrusiveness - a landscape which is now not related to the situation, but merely allusive, with the use of varying colours by now freed from the tyranny of red-orange - tracing gestures, expressions and postures, in an intentionally approximate way, tapping the classical tradition and a certain type of religious memory with absolute freedom and modernity.
The expressive act in these paintings is captured at the moment in which it happened, without excessive elaboration or school techniques from which derives an aura of freedom that exudes from the pictures, invading the private space of the viewer, engaging and convincing him of the truth - indeed the necessity of this extraordinary world of Utopia.
Bruno Sullo
Ottobre 2007
Testo critico di presentazione per la mostra "I Filosofi – opere recenti di U.Falchini"
La Casa dell'Arte - Palazzo Marini - Rosignano Marittimo
3/16 novembre 2007
translation by Donatella Badii and Mark West
See also: