What you notice, before anything else, is that the subjects of Keane`s brush have an unlikely beauty. They are banners aflutter in the shifting Garfagnana winds, their allegiances announced in the language of high art: color, form, composition, kinetic tension. Their subtext is the wonderful diversity of human experience, ranging from the dizzyingly erotic to the downright practical, and capturing, as graphically as could be imagined, our collective journey from infant to elderly. Mutande, their Italian name, is derived from the verb mutare, "to change" -- and it seems far closer to the remarkably dignified spirit of these paintings than its giggling English equivalent, "knickers."

Painting, in its most general definition, is an act of shared observation -- the visual statement of the painter, in conversation with the visual reactions of an audience. In that sense, Keane`s "Mutande di Barga" is an essay on the principal exchange of his art. But it is also an essay on the protocol of observation itself.

Put simply, mutande are everywhere in Barga, shouting out our secrets from clotheslines and drying racks strung in full sight on nearly every home; but the moot understanding is that they are not supposed to be seen.

Few artifacts of our material culture say more about us -- more about our bodies, stripped to their last shield against the naked truth of age and physical decline, more about our most intimate acts and fantasies. For that very reason, the expectation is that we will not observe them, in any meaningful way. We will not "read" them as would an anthropologist or a voyeur.

In Keane`s own view, the subject of "Mutande" is community, a central motif in his work for a quarter century, explored from the 20th century housing estates of his native London to the Ming courtyards of Nanjing, China, and from the sylvan hamlets of Finland to the fishing villages of Pantelleria island off the North African coast. Nowhere has he investigated the meaning of community in greater depth than Barga, his residence for 12 years, documented in hundreds of paintings and in thousands of photographs. His intention, his obsession, is to assemble a complete portrait of the town, comprised of individual portraits of its more than ten thousand people.

Community, as pictured in this massive undertaking, is about work and leisure, about who governs and who is governed, about property and its rights, citizenship and its responsibilities; in short, it is about the explicit, formal contracts that bind individuals into a group, a society.

Yet community is also -- and often more powerfully -- about the implicit contracts that bind us, the unspoken accords. It is about the Mutande of Barga.

Over the course of a lifetime in a town as small and densely built as this, neighbors come to know each other more intimately than do many husbands and wives in the transient suburbs and anonymous highrises of the contemporary urban world. Over the progression of years recorded by their mutande, the Bargagiani absorb an infinitely detailed and intuitive version of the portrait that compels Keane; they grow ever more closely acquainted with their neighbors` acquired habits and inherited pasts, their loves won and lost, their joys and sorrows.

They are bound, tightly, in the contract symbolized by those colorful banners waving from every home, the contract that says, in effect, "va bene, I can hang my secrets out before your windows, let them take the air and sun, because you know me -- and I trust you not to look." Frank Viviano 2005