Signs of Peace
My first, fortuitous, encounter and confrontation with the poetics of Giuseppe Siniscalchi happened during an exhibition at the Museo della Scienza e della Tecnologia. We were introduced one another by a friend in common, and right after having seen some pictures of his paintings on a smartphone I immediately understood that we had the same passion for art and the same care for the artistic heritage of our country. Another thing I immediately understood was that his art, so full of personal and human history, could not be addressed with the usual critical analysis instruments; rather the whole art history tradition was required to grasp the boundaries of such an artistic experience.What we see in Siniscalchi’s paintings is not a simple story. It is only through complex and archetypical symbols that his language reaches the creative intuition that comes from childhood. Thus, his poetics goes far beyond the usual aesthetic boundaries, reaching a complete life experience and showing a strong artistic will: the search for an epiphany that tears the Veil of Maya, inaugurating a new world that, according to Hans-Georg Gadamer, belongs only to arts.
The deepest message in Siniscalchi’s work is this inaugural promise, a sign that connects the greatest visionaries in the history of art. First of all of course Van Gogh, from whom Siniscalchi receives the testimony of colour and then among the others Basquiat, whose trail begun with the traces in the Altamira caves, 18.000 years ago.
But Siniscalchi’s promise is here and now, to carry on the redemption message that is the core of the every great visionary art. His paintings have that springing nature that speaks directly to our deepest senses, to our internal infinite whose language is always composed of signs and colours. Following Lacan, this language is also a relationship with the “Other” through “desire”. Roland Barthes would add that in artistic signs we are able to recognize that infinite tension. Thus, Siniscalchi’s poetics is a pure Kunstwollen (Alois Riegl’s “artistic intentionality”) able to present immediately a precise and absolute Weltansschauung (“way of viewing the world”).
Here an ancient world, with its immediate and elementary symbols where every creative gesture is a linguistic universe, opens up to our eyes. Siniscalchi’s greatness relies in his capacity of stopping one step before the languages becomes adult and falls in that Babel of mediation and inessentiality, spread in incompatible cultures, societies and identities.
A common language, a new Esperanto, appears on the contrary in these paintings, able to speak to everybody, playing with its signs and gestures, as a child building sand castles on the beach. Kafka showed us how castles can become very serious adult games, while Siniscalchi encourages us not to lose our senses in them, rediscovering their deeper meaning. This new narrative is embodied by the recurring little human figure, an iconographic topòs that here becomes the first observer of reality “outside of it”. Reality is immediately elaborated by this little man into a pictorial universe.
For example in “Rest – Meditation after labour”, where sunburnt varnish recalls a memory of time gone that now, in complete rest, invites us to meditate on our lives. It is the same subject of Rodin’s Thinker and Francis Bacon’s portrait of Van Gogh: the innocence of the entire humanity.
“Children games” then get more and more complex, less innocents, as the fat pastel sign shows, in a quarrel with the canvas, as if an invisible cat was playing with a ball of thread in a world “beyond the mirror”, as the one of Alice in Wonderland. In “13” the thread finds a loom that leads it to the status of “textile sign”. It is hard not to think of Basquiat, and the primitive elements of cave painting. Here we would have to name many well known and less known artists, as Norberto Proietti or Riccio, an unrecognized Milanese painter, who were able to return to their creative childhood again in the course of years, thanks to a vital and playful sign. Also Milanese is the theme of the “Climber”, as the fifty years of artistic research of the Cenobio group (headed by Ugo la Pietra and Angelo Verga) since their first exposition in 1962 shows.
Then comes also the engraving technique of the “Four flowers” which reminds us of the graphic sign mastered by Dutch painters, the same that Van Gogh appreciated in the works of Rembrandt. It is a digging sign, leaving a trace as the furrow in ploughed land ready to receive the redeeming semen.
When we enter the city of “Fantasia” (whose proper name recalls the invisible cities of Italo Calvino) we discover furthermore a metropolis made of Lego bricks, where a child architect, maybe the young Van Doesburg, opposes his creative compositions to the demiurgic model of the XVIIIthcentury Utopists (then yearned for by the Freemason in the following century). The “Precarious Architectures” warn us against this Hybris, returning to the signs of Piranesi, whose forms are as clear-cut as fragile and absurd in their equilibrium. In “Abtract” these signs reach the pure synthesis of shapes, as in the late Mondrian.
As in childhood, nightmares soon leave for the stillness of awakening: “Dawn on the lake” has the quiet landscape quality of Giotto, mixed with the dazzled look of Henri Rousseau and the edges of Carlo Carrà. And it is in this landscape that we find, bent, that little human figure. It is the same man seen in a 1888 summer night, in a desolated café in Paris. Van Gogh is also there in ”Dawn on the mountain”, but this time together with its friend Emile Bernard, whose symbolism is well depicted by the cows in the fields.
In Siniscalchi’s visionary works we are reminded of many other painters: the night visions of William Blake, the impulsive gestures of Pollock, the colour symphonies of Schifano, the “Big Bang” explosion with which Kandinsky shook up the Impressionism. “Stillness under the moon” is still under the influence of an impressionistic relaxation, but it is only the preparation to spring into the vortex of Expressionism. Thus we reach an “Happyness” very different from the Joie de vivre of Matisse and bounded to a precise sign of redemption – a new cross – that Bacon and many others (for example Hermann Nitsch) followed. It is a precise iconography, recurring, as recurring is the theme of melancholy in Munch’s works. We see it in the figure with the hat, in the cross and in the Wa-peace symbol, in the setting moon, in the pure reds, yellows and blues that recompose the unity of primary colours by clumping in that vortex.
And there is more: in that deep whirlpool, where Dürer’s sign meets the ones of Vedova and Kline, composing Panic visions as the ones of Bonnard, a complete artistic palingenesis occurs. It is the contamination with the Buddhist figurative culture through the solid tension of the strongly iconographic Japanese tradition. The Wa ideogram is thus a bridge between the two worlds, as between the two original signs of the ear of wheat (the spiritual nourishment of art) and of the mouth (the human soul, to which art addresses), in a new meaning of peace.
Thus we recognize that “Beacon of peace” as the light indicating a new world, a universe emerged from the archaic deepness of human soul, whose symbols have an apotropaic function: a defence for the sacred and redeeming message of a new peace.
Peace, the beauty through which art can save humanity.