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Critico
d'arte e curatore del Catalogo 'Icone del Jazz', Angelus Novus
Ed. 2004
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A.
Gasbarrini
Icons
of Jazz
by Antonio Gasbarrini.
Exerpt from the Catalogue “Icone del Jazz”,
Angelus Novus Edizioni, 2004
Music and painting, or, sound and color. Thanks to their enlightening
correspondence in the early 1900s, Schonberg and Kandinsky, two
of the founding fathers of Modernism, can be recognized for having
laid out the theoretical groundwork for the synesthetic adjoining
of these two creative arts.
This is traced in a dissonance, rather than harmony, of revolutionary
sounds and colors that subsequently merged in Kandinsky’s abstract
painting and Schonberg’s dodecaphonic music. It is especially Kandinsky’s
1911 painting Impression 3 (Konzert) that best illustrates this
sonorous interconnection, resulting from his emotional reaction
to a concert by Schonberg and his reflections upon the book, “The
Spiritual in Art,” published that December. In Konzert, an abstract
black surface of the grand piano is splayed against an extensive
yellow background.
“Like an eternal silence without future and hope, black, the color
least gifted of sound, plays contemplatively (...) compared to which
all other colors (even the weakest) become bolder and more defined
(...) Yellow, which evokes lighter shades (with its particular quality)
can be intensified to a level practically intollerable to the eye
and soul. Brought to this extreme, it emits a sound comparable to
the acuteness of a trumpet, or to the stridency of a brass band.”
While regretfully here not able to pursue other intriguing Kandiskyan
uses of color (blue, red, green, and white, in particular), this
brief introduction brings us to the artist Angela Rossi’s similar
explorations of “sounds of color”, entitled Icons of Jazz, a collection
of 30 works on plexiglass. An Abruzzese artist trained in Lombardy,
her pieces, sized 70 x 100 cm (horizontally) and 100 x 70 cm (vertically),
expose emblematically that indissoluble link between music and painting
in effigies of the principal protagonists, historical and contemporary,
of the world of jazz.
This music well exemplifies Kandinskyan theoretical underpinnings
from the black and white skin of these legendary heroes, to the
evocatively warm, melancholic, desperate and instinctual sounds
and rhythms of the blues, including its cool, sophisticated and
rational pentagrammatic variations. Exemplified by the title, Icons
of Jazz evokes a sacredness in the auras of these images of the
cults of jazz history, respecting foremost the technique of sacred
icons painted on glass with the primary characteristic of having
been conceptualized as a negative image. With the painting on the
back side of the transparent surface, the most resistance of the
pigments to chromatic deterioration over time is assured, and also
brings out a greater fluidity, or smoothness, of the luministic
and plastic effects.
Angela Rossi’s figurative portraits, representing famous people
with their instruments and voice, are inspired by popular photographs
(from newspapers, magazines, books, and internet), and are influenced
by post-pop art (and necessarily so, considering the American roots
of jazz music), while at the same time having close associations
with abstract expressionism. Her work captures the essence of Modernism,
which, instead of stopping at anthropomorphic or detailed realism,
conjures the atmosphere of a place where open and closed spaces
are both bold and attenuated in their resonance, with their rhythmic
variations in massive colors almost brought to a whisper and never,
expressionistically, shouted. Moreover, for some pieces the original
icon was painted on the back side of the plexiglass as a positive
image, so that the finished painting appears as a mirror-image (or
turned at 180 degrees.) (…) It is a challenging play on “reality
vs fiction”, a simulation of “changing physionomies” caught-in-the-act
of their performances, as contemporary art evolves into something
ever more disconcerted and disconcerting (three dimensional renderings
of photographs). We evidence here the proof, and the success, of
the risks involved in chromatically “modifying” these portraits
with warm, earthy, blue, grey, and “acid” yellow-green colors, through
the close-up perspective of faces and bodies freely elasticized.
The life-force of each of Angela Rossi’s icons is captured in the
fundamental comparison between the photographic mould (flat in nature
due to its bidimensionality) and its voluminized pictorial representation,
often embodying an apollinian-dionysian dialectic characteristic
of such tragic and drammatic biographies. “Simonide”, said Plutarch,
“defined painting as silent poetry, and poetry as a vocal painting;
painters render actions as they occur, but words after they have
been pronounced.” Carrying out the concept “Ut pictura poesis” (the
humanistic theory that painting is equal to poetry) in her artwork,
Angela Rossi pays special attention in her dynamically plastic renderings
of hands and mouths, “essential” tools for any sung or played musical
piece.
This is also conveyed in her images by the swaying of arms to the
persistent rhythms of the drum, the final expulsions of deep breaths,
and the waning pauses and silences. In conclusion, even if it is
a mere smile to brighten up a few faces (Dizzy Gillespie, Sarah
Vaughan, Art Blakey) or the magnified discernability of “visual
sounds” created by the perfect fusion between performer and instrument
(Duke Ellington, Joe Mc Fee, Charles Mingus, John Coltrane, Louis
Armstrong, Sonny Rollins, Eric Dolphy), a Baudelarian spleen of
tonality wafts through the pictorial notes (as seen in the indefinite
gaze of Ella Fitzgerald or the restless look of Miles Davis).
It is the heaviness of an existential angst illuminated by the greyish-black
contrasting colors of the night, which chases the cosmic solitude
of Chet Baker and Enrico Rava (practically lost in surrounding greys),
is chromatically warmed by the intoxicating fumes of Thelonius Monk’s
cigarette, and then freezes up into an ephemeral image of Bill Evans.
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© Angela Rossi - 2008
All Rights Reserved
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