The journey, as metaphor, is as old as Homer’s
Odyssey and the Book of Exodus, as rich in meaning
as the Chinese Dao, “the Path.” From
the moment that homo sapiens began sketching on the
wall of a cave – antelope thundering across
a plain, hunters in pursuit – motion and change
have been among the universal obsessions of art,
pondered as though they held the very meaning of
life.
This is the animating bond between two Barga artists who never
met, Bruno Cordati and Keane. “Signs Along the Path,” Keane’s
exposition at Casa Cordati, is at once an hommage to the man who
lived and worked there, and a meditation on the journeys that formed
them both.
Keane set off from his native London in 1971 at the age of 15,
on a quest whose itinerary to the Province of Lucca included passages
as a street performer and fire-eater in Spain and France, and eventually
ranged as far as the remote Sicilian island of Pantelleria, the
Finnish woodlands and the Yangtze Valley in China. His travels
are recorded in a wanderer’s curriculum vitae, resistant
always to fixed categories: Keane the painter has been Keane the
conceptual artist, Keane the sculptor, and more recently, Keane
the Internet webmaster.
Cordati, who was born in Barga in 1890 and buried there 89 years
later, is at first glance more hermit than wanderer. He was nearly
40 before his works were exhibited outside of Tuscany, and in his
early fifties when he spent four years in the war-torn Balkans
(1939-1943) that were to transform his work.
The conventional wisdom is that Cordati’s most important
statements were made before and during his Balkan sojourn, in portraits
and character studies that ignored the abstract mode of his contemporaries
in favor of a psychologically intense realism. In Keane’s
view, however, Cordati’s decisive journey as an artist began
after his return to Italy and continued unabated to his death in
1979: “He painted over his own earlier work, searching for
new meaning in composition and structure, a new language to describe
the world as he had seen and experienced it.”
They are, for the most part, dark voyages, in which shadows of
Cordati figures from the twenties and thirties haunt an enigmatic
abstract landscape.
On a number of Cordati’s unused canvases, provided by his
grandson Giordano, Keane began exploring this landscape in oil
and acrylic in 2002. Recognizable Cordati motifs and subjects gyrate,
like restless ghosts, on the paintings’ margins. Motion is
an inescapable theme, but so too is language – and more specifically,
what Keane refers to as the “coded language that defines
a community.”
Community and the journey, the native and the wanderer: On the
surface, they are the definitions of paradox. Yet like so many
paradoxes, their very contradictions hold a powerful logic. As
any wanderer can tell you, the journey is, above all, a search
for community, for the language of human connection.
Mysterious symbols are the signposts of Keane’s paintings,
references to arcane communal languages. One language borrows its
vocabulary from the literal signposts that direct travelers along
rural trails in the Barga countryside; another conducts its adepts
into the virtual environment – the virtual community – of
21st century communications; a third plunges the viewer into an
investigation of composition and perspective that discovers logic
amidst apparent chaos in the final three decades of Bruno Cordati’s
long artistic life.
“ He was on a mission throughout those years, pursuing a thought, an idea,” Keane
says of Cordati. Like those distant ancestors sketching an endless hunt. Like
Keane himself.
Frank Viviano
Barga, May 2003
all horizontal
images by kind permission of Arnold K Martinsen
Complete images from this exhibition can
be seen here
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