"[...] I began to distinguish the various types of poetic knowledge: there are painters who do not express reality, they found it; they do not represent it, they show it, they reveal it in its full modernity; I mean that they do not give us a reflected image of reality as an echo of their individual way of thinking it, and psychologically animating it, they do not express their participation in a sublimated image that only acts as a screen to reality.
These painters experience painting as the manifestation of reality, they must penetrate into painting, penetrating at the same time the life of the world; they allow themselves to be welcomed by reality; for them, the pictorial matter is not a simple tool that gives the possibility to build fantastic images to be projected on things, it is not the means to artificially build psychological aggregations in which the ego, identifying itself, alienates itself, it is the living matter of their ego and of the world.
For these artists, painting is the body of the world they must fertilize.
Giotto, the men who painted on the walls of prehistoric caves, Rembrandt, Velazquez, Courbet, Michelangelo, Cézanne ... Masaccio, Monet, all these and others in a different way have not made a speech on reality, nor have they expressed those dazzling suggestions that arise in the soul of an ego separated from the life of the world; they do not make a speech to us but reveal a silence within which reality lives; they do not want to convince or charm us, they simply present life in its making, reveal it in its current being, make it present beyond the limits of their person. Instead, there is an art that is the expression of an individuality that does not seek reality, an art that shows us appearances, the various aspects of reality; this art is the expression of the human soul getting lost in fascinating reflections of images; artists of this type are always struggling to own life and continually lose it.
Their art can also be the expression of a generous attempt to understand the truth, but this continually escapes them: Caravaggio, El Greco, van Gogh ... Picasso, Pollock, Mondrian. Then there is an aesthetic art of "style". Here art can reach very subtle forms of enchantment. One aspect of reality completely absorbs the artist's spirit so that he remains magically attracted and enchanted; then he is subjected to a fascinating magic: he is bewitched and loses all human will: Paolo Uccello, Vermeer… Corot, Matisse, Poussin.
Another type of artist is the one who, immediately renouncing the struggle for understanding reality, trades in the obsessions that such renunciation arouses in him; he plays with these hallucinations by manipulating them culturally. This artist cultivates lies; he cleverly trades his impotences by virtue; he is the artist for whom art never has relations with living human reality, but it is only a linguistic game without words: he invents and constructs forms that are more or less skilled as sterile devices animated by his retching death.
There is therefore a race of painters who experience painting as a reality that substantiates human nature. [...] There are painters who paint to make "beautiful" or "ugly" pictures according to this or that project, it matters little, and they count for little. They can also invent images of great effect expressing some aspects of the psyche, and of the appearances of the world, but they never grasp the spirit of reality, they remain prisoners of their inventions, they are builders of tombs; because the soul of painting is not in its plastic values, nor in the expressive possibilities of its linguistic material; these are nothing but accidents; the greatest artists tend to understand a substance, which they perceive beyond any image.
The values of painting are not in its expressive possibilities, just as the essence of man is not found in his purely psychic existence.
From prehistoric paintings to the present day, man, through the forms of art, has always, consciously or not, sought himself; but painting is not a mythical entity, a presence outside historical time, a body situated in an abstractly metaphysical space; the essence of him is understood
in the very act of painting, it is a reality that man creates.
The temptation to make pictures is the painter's original sin; he is overcome by painting.
Certainly the aesthetic suggestion is strong, but the desire of our being to overcome all its contingent determination is stronger: whenever the will to possess life pushes us in an attempt to enclose it in certain forms, this same will of absolute possession, sensing the limit , pushes us to overcome. [...]
We inevitably project our will onto things, for good or for evil; projection is the only way to walk towards things. In projection we try to transfer all forces onto things, we engage all the powers of the soul, thus trying to realize the deepest will of our being: to unite totally with things, to embrace.
Usually the projection is a psychological reaction, an automatism, an expression of the vegetative life of the soul; a confused, undifferentiated echo of our psychism, is devoid of intentionality, a product of passive emotional and mental habits: projection is nothing more, in this case, than a ghost that feeds anxiety and despair in our soul this is an expression of the absence of a true relationship between our ego and the world, constantly renewing our unreality.
But in the active projection all our vital forces are involved as in an immense cascade whose principle is existential chaos and the end of those differentiated figures that are at the same time a fulfillment of our human self and of the world; it is a creative relationship that brings together the subject and the object of the projection: it includes them in a relationship in which they are united and distinct in a rhythm that transforms them, increases them by emancipating them in more free and superior forms of existence. The confused forces projected, transforming themselves into rhythm, realize the erotic fulfillment. In fact, the subject and the object in the naturalistically experienced consciousness are felt as contradictory, opposite, or promiscuously confused. Thus, while we wish to achieve a true embrace, we actually invent unreality in projecting our fantasies.
Exorcising those fantasies is the first, real, moment of truth to be realized in the work.
When, in the pictorial work, the psychologically regressive repressed contents with which we unconsciously identify ourselves begin to objectify themselves in our consciousness, then a new state of being appears and we discover a new dimension of our soul and our flesh, a new life of feeling and a new mental attitude make their way, quite different from the naively vitalistic, amorphous and automatic ones that we commonly suffer: the negative turns into the positive with an act that is the immediate expression of this revolution, conversion of the our spirit.
The ego is freed from compulsory identifications, [...]. The experimental certainty that this possibility is the only true possibility to be realized, experimentally, forced me to abandon all the useless pathetic cries of the crocodile, the evasive and consoling escapes into the worlds of dreamlike transcendences; this certainty was an evidence from which I could no longer free myself: every attempt to escape it only caused me deeper confusions, anxieties and disturbances, thus forcing me with more violence and determination to practice painting to find the right way to practice it. "
(Monteveglio, 1970-73)
Bruno Pinto, TPer uscire dalla Valle. Critica di me stesso, edited by Omar Calabrese, La Casa Usher, Ponte alle Grazie Editori, Florence 1992, pp. 67-76
Bruno Pinto, in Cat. Di fronte e attraverso, Mazzotta, Milan 2005