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| A message of serenity and harmony |
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by Paolo Rizzi |
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“When I have some space left over in a painting,
I adorn it with figures of my own invention”, said Paolo Veronese
to the judges of the Holy Inquisition. And he added: “We painters
use the same license as poets and madmen”. |
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A glass, two wild flowers in a little
vase, a piece of bread fresh from the oven, a young girl, a glimpse
of the living room, this is what Ernani Costantini paints. However, he
does not distort, as do so many, neither does he superimpose a ‘style’;
he merely emerges the object in a joyfully diffused light which
he knows, and which refracts into different coloured hues, softens
and perhaps flashes into a bright shade. Despite being a man of
great intellect, who has worked periodically on large cycles of
wall paintings, he paints as a ‘purist’, like someone
in search of an escape, tinged with nostalgia. His paintings reflect
certain features of the works of Veronese: individual pieces, part
of a lovingly caressed reality, beyond all reason.
Perhaps he would not have been popular with the judges of the Holy
Inquisition or even with Diderot either,
because he who tries to find ‘meanings’ in
Costantini, will find very little; he who searches for an ideology
or a so-called ‘commitment’ even less. It is difficult
to find a more ‘un-committed’ painter than him. If
his painting teaches us anything (though why should it have to
teach?) it is love for the small things, love for a certain clear
light, love for a certain composition, for a detail which is usually
missed, for that special something with its air of enchantment…
And yet – who knows on what it depends – when I leave
his studio or the gallery where his works are displayed, I feel
lighter and also, I must confess, happier. Costantini calms the
nerves. He relaxes us. This could also be thanks to the splendid
painting. In the end however, I realise that the ‘lesson’ is
instilled in my mind: and it is a moral ‘lesson’. The
serenity, harmony, the order of things, the internal equilibrium
reflected on the outside, the eternal sentiment of the classical… It
soon becomes plain that Costantini really is a ‘committed’ painter,
and even more so than so many others? |
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January 1972 |
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Apparently, Ernani Costantini’s painting
is outside of his time. It is a painting which could be defined, in
broad terms, as impressionist: linked that is to the transience of
the phenomenon, in the sense from a purely sensory view point. But
first we must ask ourselves what the modus aestheticus of
our time is: if it is really that which is reflected by a technological
model of society, with all its implications, not just of a technical
type (plastic laminates, steel profiles, neon, industrial paints,
polyesters) but also of a psychological and sociological nature (alienation,
depersonalisation, consumerism and so forth). Or if on the other hand,
there isn’t a kind of rejection in force today, above all an
ethical one, of every unilateralism, of all acquiescence to the so-called
dominant culture.
In fact, it would be very strange if a man of culture, open to today’s
issues and engaged in both social and religious initiatives, such as Ernani Costantini,
had not understood the hard lesson of being ‘inside reality’. It
is clear however, that Costantini has made a choice which is not only aesthetic,
but which has its roots in man’s new awareness which is developing more
and more nowadays, in contrast with the prevailing pragmatic and technological
school of thought.
Any analysis of Costantini’s painting must be based only on this. Even
as we consider the ‘historical’ reasons for his discourse, in other
words the beginnings of his career during the postwar period, when a new group
of young artists emerged at Opera Bevilacqua La Masa in Venice, it is important
to emphasise the widespread anti-mannerist positions, which make the latest generation
linked to Ca’ Pesaro (Venice museum of modern art) an
oasis in itself compared to the dominant movements of those years. Perhaps only
the neocubist lesson of the structuring of space according to vector forces of
the internal shape was absorbed by Costantini, as by his contemporaries: and
it was once again (as had happened nearly half a century earlier with Gino Rossi)
a realisation of the truth of things, above and beyond artistic or pictorial
conventions: certainly not then an aesthetic structure imposed from above. Cézanne
and cubism were useful to Costantini in order to ‘solidify’ (this
was the term coined by the “patriarch of
Aix”) the envisaged object: in other words, to reconcile the two poles
of sensibility and intellect. It was the great Georges Braque who asserted that
it is the “rule
which corrects the emotion”. However it is a rule which can not be purely
formalistic: it involves all man’s actions and is therefore, substantially,
a moral rule.
I realise that those who do not know Costantini may have some doubts regarding
this moral assertion within a work of art which is so closely linked, as we have
said, to external perception. It is necessary however to keep in mind how all
dualism is resolved, in the original ethic of Christianity as in its modern interpretations,
from Georges Bernanos to Jean Daniélou, in a unified tension in which
salvation is the result of a juxtaposition of opposites (grace). Thus, in Costantini’s
painting rationality does not lead to the discarding of sentiment, form does
not block light, composition does not suffocate colour: these poles are merely
the result of different forces, which converge through man’s completeness
towards a shared direction. On closer inspection, the meeting is simply the result
of an ethical as well as aesthetic kind of fusion: and the ‘message’ which
derives from it is that of equilibrium, serenity, of a golden rule.
Costantini’s painting is to be included then, with the spontaneity and
simplicity of real ‘commitment’, in a school of thought which is
today seen as ‘counterculture’: no forced return to nature, no nostalgia
for the old strategies, on the contrary in fact, it is a clear proposal for a
new ‘balanced’ dimension of mankind.
This then, in brief, is the key to understanding Costantini. This actually opens
the door however to something new and ancient at the same time. The small humble
object placed on the table, bathed by the soft light which affectionately envelopes
it, may indicate, symbolically, the way out of the anguished turmoil of technological
oppression. The object reveals the active presence of man, the calm sure hand
which put it there and, maybe, forged the value of a gesture which could last
for eternity. Everything becomes familiar, a part of daily life:
but not banal. Behind the shape hinted at by a sensitive, delicate brush, the
essence of the meaning of life is revealed. The measurement of it: man’s
harmony with nature which guides the artist’s every move, like an offer
of love. |
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January 1973 |
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