IL PITTORE DEL VENTO

Here is the poet that has often dared, with his obligation coming from instinct and imagination, to capture the imponderable, the invisible, the free master of the air on his canvas. Here is the magical pied piper who calls the wind with its colors, its odors, even its flavors, consisting of sheaves and of grasses, of flights in the cypresses full of birds, of gusts of lavender and linden, amongst deposed orchards, tedious rainstorms and sweet clarity. Prior to dedicating himself to the winds – in other words the purist vocation of this artist beyond measure, stories, and passions that consist of the changing faces of the fields, small farms or gardens that are open or miniscule spaces, bounded by bushes and canals – he cultivated his mastery of portraits, by starting from the town sidewalks with colored chalk and subsequently capturing men and women in still life at the entrance of the house, or seated outside of the corner shops.

Moreover, when his talent ceased and he needed to enter into more difficult and complex trial proofs, he saved the happiness of his shapes and colors, favoring a writing that was never formal. If anything, it is always more entrusted to a new eccentricity that helped him become the painter who paints in the air every component of the wind: when it may knock over, upset or recompose the mysterious and ineffable order that we call beauty. Now that the larks are no longer afraid, they leave the thick of the grain in which they escaped low, and hidden, where the wind had a hard time blowing and stopping, like the birds.

Although knowing every cunning aspect of the wind, he cannot yet affirm how to explain why, in the vast cultivated areas, every color besides yellow is the last one to newly stand out. The surprising part of this inequality is most likely owed to the trembling of the leaves, that often change their form, like the olive tree, announcing the first tremor of the branches and then of the plants. Only, the grass tries to bend over a bit, as another fold under the passage of the wind would not be possible.

This is the moment to confess a little secret that was born in silence, but was never perceived by either of us. One day, while I watched his paintings ready to be mounted in their frames, he led me to start imagining, to a far greater extent than today, so that I could explain to myself the secret of one painting, so to speak, a painting that was so close to nature, that nothing could complicate my ideas about it. I now remember that he remained laconic, limiting himself to smiling at me, while being neither flattered nor indifferent. It was there, at that point, that our friendship was born.

I am accustomed, in my profession, to saying many words even for simple things. My guess is that it was surprising or intriguing to him: how did those paintings, which emerged from his hands, with a precision so simple and rigid that seems scientific, come from the most uncultured, naïve, even unprepared admirer of that singular, unknown, and likely unembellished beauty? What was it, in the paintings of Azzinari, that was truer than truth? He was certainly not a realist painter, i.e. one of those painters that imitated Caravaggio; and, moreover, he was not a decorative painter, who knew how to identify beauty, as was said for Federico Fellini, who, with his eyes, never made mistakes. An artist, I recalled, participates in the always incomplete work of creation, and is able to measure himself at the human level, that is at the height of the easel, while none the less seeking what the psalmist recommended, in other words “to renew everything, even ourselves”.

By now, in this same moment, we could be entering into his/her eyes, becoming the object of one of his, let’s say, figurative qualities; where the talent validates, even in the more traditional forms of art. But, I added, there is no talent that can show you, not even with the most noble of magic, a wind painted by a thousand brushstrokes, one might say, from the more inflated to the more slight, until that which, with three filaments, can depict an entire sequence of Angelopoulos.
To help me, he will intervene, amid the growing attention of, by this point, even international critics, interested in those covers that lop off the old guard of the trees, that seem to say: Respect us! We were not born just for the birds, the thunder, the darkness! We were also born for the roots and their thanks to the earth. Azzinari, who has a strong moral feeling towards everything born to live, if you are near to him, after a while, even he seems like a tree. He has the same persistent calm. Since then, I go to take a look at the notes that I took under his shadow, reconnecting, at various points, with the sense of “traveling”.

Ten years ago he asked me to write, in a beautiful catalog by Electa Press, about his paintings of Cuba, a sort of preface extracted from our first, confidential stories. We called it “A Trip to Perfection”, with the intention of conveying to the reader that it was a ship’s log, in which he noted the most unique events of his initiation. In these canvases, I remember, there was melancholy and nostalgia, innocence and joy; all inspired by a surprising nature that separated him from any artistic movement, modern or postmodern; in time placing him, for instance, as we would say within a “school”, which, in a manner of speaking, is classical. It was his dedication to the vigorous and austere men of the countryside, with their faces full of wrinkles and their nubby hands, that reawakened his interest in mankind. In this discovery there was not only the evocative strength of Calabria, but also that of Arles and of Gualtieri, where Van Gogh and Ligabue seemed to lend him the yellows and blacks already seen on the faces of the house. His painting was no longer a story, but rather a chromatic song to nature, a lyricism that unites Calabria to Cuba, to Crete and the Aegean Sea, and to Greece, in an alchemy that reflected the light of the Mediterranean and that of the Caribbean, in a sort of bridal splendor. Together we understood, and I wrote about it, that the more secluded part of Calabria was reborn in his paintings every time he encountered the sweet and sour beauty of the vast corners of the Earth.

Since then Azzinari devoted himself to a continuous search of always more arduous and severe canons of art. The artist likes to remember that he comes from humble beginnings. Benedetto Croce said “You are what you know,” as a way of inviting the people of his standing to be content and, if anything, to be thankful; even if those words could be interpreted as a merely pedagogical invitation to know more, and therefore study more! Now, at the end of this exhibition, he can place his trust in another biblical saying: “Only the normal is poetic!” The affirmation belongs to the French writer Louis Aragon, and it communicates a reassuring truth to him. Today, we know that we are honoring an artist who will not, even if he wants to, be less than what he knows. That is, how well he lived and thus who he is. We are all happy and honored to declare this, at a time when, for its multiple significations, it certifies happiness and honor. We felt it when, at the exhibition “Places of Myth”, we saw Azzinari in search of that clear, firm and metaphysical light, that rises in the east, along our coasts, from Puglia to Magna Grecia, illuminating the rocks, the columns, the metope, the rolling rocks in the fields, which came to rest, through arcane shapes that were partially hidden by grain, and liberated, every time, when harvest time came.

Here I have another note: Azzinari did more than just remain in awe, and capture that light in his paintings. He returned from his journey, from his “Et in Arcadia ego”, with a large number of canvases, which, it seemed, went past the darkness of Tucidide, who fought for a rigorous exclusion of “mythic symbols” – those of the gods, destiny, nature – from everything that actually came from mankind. Myth, the Athenian historian said, constitutes the limit of human reason, of what it cannot predict nor do. Azzinari was already at that level, at a search for knowledge, much as the sunrise that briefly stops along the profile of the mountains evokes a line of air that reawakens the profiles of the world. This is why the paintings of that distant exhibition, announced like a journey through an extraordinary utopia, remained the fruit of a gaze that captures a luminosity more oblique than vertical, seen from below, more from our eyes than from the eyes of the gods. To them went the tribute which one must give to the allegories, to their ever-arcane presence, but not to the astonished desertion of those who live a sort of inert stupefaction. In any case, it is not in the nature of Azzinari, a painter of reality, to simulate appearances: if anything, they validate the primitive force of a light that passes not only through our eyes, but also through ourselves.

It was not by chance that almost all the paintings had three expressive layers. The first was full of broom trees, spikes, branches, grasses, in which, here and there, were added the vivid flowers of the field. The second was the crucial, ontological part of the representation, with white colors that stand out and stream towards the sea of small-sized stones, about which Azzinari was not embarrassed, as he said, “I must reconcile the already abstract quality of the imagination with a nature that, from its origin, is made for man; it is reality.” The third was the horizon in which the usual scenarios of the painter are abandoned, with an even more persistent fixity and, rather than harming the composition, render it even more spectacular. These paintings were the ones that showed us a mysterious skill, even a wisdom that I had already seen in his painting: the presence of the wind. In his previous paintings the wind had been less evident, whereas here, freed from any allegorical connection, it was offered clearly from the first encounter with the painting. Never before had been seen so clearly the vortices, the disarray, the bows and the ascents that the wind causes, passing or twirling in the thick forest of stems that intersect with one another.

Azzinari does not deny his more natural talent; rather he submits it to another test with the obstinacy of the experimenter who is used, by now, to bettering himself. Here, indeed, the relationship with nature became mythical, but in the opposite direction to the abstraction: on the contrary, the opening and closing of the vast and light array of colors in endless expanses seemed the answer of a true vocation to the, let’s say, academic canons. It was as if he wanted to immediately declare his first choice – one that was never scholastic or convoluted, but was also not merely rural or naturalistic – on which he built the primary identity of his expressive world.

If someone who was perhaps looking for effects, ventured to call Azzinari “Painter of the Wind” – thereby making him virtually unique in contemporary pictorial panoramas – it would not come from an image that might, still, be credible. In fact, those flashes of “true nature” contribute to keeping alive the recognition of a painter that dives, or aspires to plunge into, the imaginary, without denials or renunciations, because what preserves and authenticates the technique and the poetry of Azzinari, ultimately his art, is a continuous interplay between the seen and the perceived, but with reality constantly before the eyes, a reality that is never erratic in style, nor conceptually vague.

Of course, here there was an escape, but it was driven by a desire for knowledge, by a need for new awareness. This is why that exhibition will remain more than a stop-off or pivot point in Azzinari’s journey. Azzinari, certainly, does not lack the vocation of he who searches, knowing full well, by now, that for every time and place in which he makes an attempt, he will be the first one he will meet. His balance, which a mature adulthood postpones for the future, will not see his discoveries cede to the prestige that came, for example, from having been chosen by Fidel Castro as he posed for his life-like portrait, in such a way as to represent “who he is” in a painting. For what it’s worth, I have this idea: Azzinari was arriving at his most difficult conquest, that of being, yes, a scrutinizer of reality, but also of taking a far more elusive, more poetic measure; that of not necessarily devoting himself to fantastic suggestions, nor to prestigious awards, but ruling the relationship with his foremost vocation, i.e. to not stray too far from his talent, that is, from himself.

I saw the paintings that gradually left traces of his journey, towards so-called perfection.

Here, in this very invisible boundary line, Azzinari knew where to linger and move between two borders that would touch not only at the point of maximum proximity, but also at the point of ambiguity and, ultimately, of risk. He wanted to understand, and I with him – even before becoming enamored with the suggestions of Pindar and Xenophon, Euripides and Hesiod, Homer and Apollodorus – those places, from the “flowering desert” in Macedonia to the “cradle of Apollo” in Delos, from the “gorges of Alcantara” in Taormina to the “night blue” in Metaponto, from ”tribute to Demeter”, goddess of grain, to the “sunset yellow” in the Sithonia Bay, and all the pictorial quotations collected along an endless journey, through bays, lakes, banks, rocks, plains, in a continuous “figurative meditation on the Azzinari-sedimented myth, a form of highly-modern debunking”, to quote Claudio Strinati in a page, in my opinion, of some of the most beautiful, disenchanted and intense of Azzinari’s paintings that were devoted to him.

Strinati’s intuition, according to which “this artistic experience is a sort of great visual introduction to the world of scattered myths…” corresponds to the critical need to bring Azzinari’s innovation back to its archetypal form. An impressionistic or mere cultural reading of that world could lead to a rhetorical transposition of reality and myth, of history, of material and metaphysical imagination, addressed in the exemplary forms of De Chirico. It is true that today Azzinari’s name is linked to a museum, no less, which has a historically striking location. Yet, the recognition that he received during its consecration already confirmed his rank as an artist, but does not have to distract him from the search, from the pursuit, of new legitimizations. This same collection reassures us, with a frankness equal only to scruples, that if anything, he had not pushed beyond his knowledge of himself.

Azzinari has remained faithful to his “dense and lush fabric of herbs and flowers” – to say, with Strinati’s pen, what I had tried to think before reading the writing of the scholar – but also to Nature as something “living totally animated” by our mysterious, unstoppable fantasy, that of mankind. This journey, in short, is not a compendium, nor a tribute or a laurel to culture and style; it is what could take shape under the gaze and brushes of an obscure artist who discovered himself on the street, in France, where, by drawing portraits of hurried customers, he was able to gain the colors and the canvases that could be shown to an increasingly wider audience.

Today – already in a museum – his realism is revealed both at the apex, and at the start, of another coherent and tireless set of trial proofs. We observe the artist while he faces the grace of being more song than speech, at the service of the uninterrupted patience on which it rests, for who knows how long, namely the stubborn innocence and beauty of nature. That wrinkled, twisted olive tree, which Azzinari loves to paint relentlessly, were it not for the freshness of the painter, would resemble him in the opposite sense; in the visible, light and swirling wind, in a collection that has, and still does, attract so much attention. But, one would be mistaken if one also considered Franco Azzinari as the painter of an ephemeral that in Nature does not exist. Besides, one cannot be in a Museum of scrupulous and cultivated importance merely by painting “wisps of grass.”

A trip to his motherland, Magna Graecia, the Greater Greece, reveals to him the primordial spell of the ancient Mediterranean culture, surely after admiring the archaeological remains, the aesthetic ideal inspiring them, but most of all the basic concept at the origin of all the rest: the heathen cult of nature, the pure pleasure derived from its perception. The Christian West has always maintained a bizarre attitude towards nature: on the one hand, a deep admiration for God’s creation (take for example Saint Francis’ Lauds), but, on the other, it also has evident reservations over the pleasure of its perception, as if such a pleasure could invite to sin or deter from the real end, the worship of God.

In ancient Greece, the man who best understood in philosophical terms the principle of nature’s pleasure was Epicurus. And we well know how intense was the early Christian and medieval theologians’ ideological struggle against Epicurus, whom they deemed “amoral” and anti-spiritual.

I do no know whether Azzinari’s wheat fields are deliberately “Epicurean”, but they would be seen from a more appropriate view if they were considered in a speculative dimension closer to Ancient Greece or Magna Graecia than to the Christian West. That is, I believe Azzinari has reached the core of the relationship between modernity and the ancient world, with a procedure not far from that of Nietzsche. Only wonderful statues, only grand and imposing temples can evoke the world’s ancient Mediterranean culture. To capture it in its real essence, one must retrieve the principle of pleasure, with and within nature, setting aside the moralistic hindrances of Christianity. For a Christian, to compare a man with an animal is a way to despise him, given that God wanted man to be the centre of the world. On the contrary, ancient mythology continually turns men into animals, without depriving them of their importance, as if to meet the need to feel a part of nature, as an animal, or a plant. The wheat fields in themselves are perfectly suitable to prove the difference of views between heathen and Christian civilizations. In biblical and evangelical symbology, a wheat field is something positive, but the temptations of the devil may hide within it.

Azzinari’s seas of wheat, ancient and pre-Christian, are alien to such symbology. Nothing could lead us to think that they may hide evil, whatever its shape may be: no need for distinctions, we must only grasp the goodness in its entirety. Nothing could deny us the pure pleasure of contemplating them, without the sense of man’s detachment from the rest of Creation, but in a total identification with nature. Nothing could provoke more peacefulness and delight, as if it were the yearned for goal of our existence. In these paintings by Azzinari, nothing has a human dimension, but nature’s. The wheat fields are not seen with human eyes, the horizon is barely perceived, the perspective is not mathematical or Brunellescian. One could count each single spike, so close they appear, as could never happen in real life. And the wind animates them as a spirit of nature.

The perspective of Azzinari’s “animated” fields reflects the view of a bird or an insect, high and low at the same time, to allow man to feel a bird among birds, an insect among insects, nature among nature. It is amazing that this awareness new and ancient at the same time, does not make us feel incomplete with respect to the privileged role that the Catholic doctrine offers us. Because, as Spinoza said Deus cannot be but sive nature with no other purpose but itself.

This unconscious union of glimpses of the past and its emotions. So what connects me to Azzinari is not only our mutual Arberesche origins, language and legends, of both having grown up in the Mediterranean, but also the feeling of art captured in his paintings which goes beyond the original style recognised by all. An art of emotions born from a creative force, not by the mind, a poetic transformation vibrating with reality, not just a perfect photographic copy, in so much as it is realism at first glance, where one can hear the voices of the evening, in a field of oats, percept the perfume of the sea and origano, only within the work of this artist does the landscape become the landscape of the soul. One has the impression that, although Azzinari has his easle and palette of colours and a real landscape before him, he paints what is within him.

I am sure that even with his eyes closed, he would still be able to depict all the wonders of nature, in all its mysterious intensity. It is only when he opens his eyes, to gaze upon one of his enlightening glimpses of life, that he discovers another angle, the one captured during his continual pilgrimages far from his native Calabria.

It is an unenchanted suspended view, and for this reason profoundly authentic. And so when Azzinari observes and paints a flowering broom shrub nestling in the grass, with the sea on the horizon, he gives us the warmth of its golden yellow flowers, the supple strength of its branches, used in olden times by peasants to tie bundles of firewood, and their fatigue, in the strength of its fibres which were woven into cloth. Finding use even today in a mixture of plastics used for the automobile industry or becoming anticanerous biodrugs: a magical plant, the «perfumed broom shrub, gentle flower…who comforts the desert» loved by poets such as Leopardi; and by scientists alike. Suspended between tradition and modernism.

But with a glance Azzinari catches the wind, as it whirls across a broom shrub patch, carrying its seeds to be sown in far away lands, whilst void of the strength or will to uproot these plants, so firmly rooted in the soil of their native land. Their land. Their connection with the painter grows forever stronger and more exclusive, deprived of aesthetic impurities, yet overflowing with warmth, love and sweetness, like the love of one’s mother who gave one the gift of life. Azzinari is a painter who takes refuge from conceptualism and table drawn aestheticism. His metaphors surge spontaneously from the hill grasses and the charred flowers, now rigorous in their vivid spring colours, now dry and coated with their melancholy dust of late summer. Above all the great metaphor of the ever present wind is prominent: breathing its breath of life upon the foliage of olive trees, blowing through the Mediterranean thicket and lentisco shrubs, caressing the aniseed flowers and poppies, the ears of wheat and wild oats, iris, sainfoin and mallow. It is movement, a constant escape, nostalgia for the past and for the future.

It is above all the delight in the warm colours of life. Yet among the blades of grass and the contorted branches of the trees, one can perceive the haunting presence of what, in an ancient Arberesche rhapsody, is called “hjea e erès”, the shadow of wind which conceals death. It is but an instant an inevitable thought which makes one appreciate and embrace one’s world with more determination. Finally, the mature luminous colours of Franco Azzinari in their refined simplicity, call out to the wind the beauty of life, in spite of the sharp charred thorns, in spite of the dry grass bending beneath the weight of pain, in spite of the shadows which creep into the obscure corners of our present. The sunlight rising from Azzinari’s gaze is fortunately stronger, it can even illuminate those traces of sea between sky and land, it shines through the wind of life and joy as it caresses our nature and makes it eternal.