Il Pittore del Vento

WIND AND THE SOUL IN FRANCO AZZINARI’ S LANDSCAPES

by  Vittorio Sgarbi

Castello Ducale di Casoli (Chieti)

31 July /21 August 2005

I believe it’s not too far to say that the wheat fields series is undoubtedly the most fortunate and inspired amongst those produced by Franco Azzinari, a still young Calabrian painter, with an over thirty-year old career. With their apparent simplicity, in an absolute triumph of natural colours and shapes, Azzinari’s fields are authentic concentrates of thought.
To a certain extent, Azzinari’s artistic journey moved in parallel with his desire to experience the world, which led him to leave Calabria, heading first to France, then to the Far East, America, Brazil, and Cuba. Now, in his fifties, Azzinari felt the need to resume a direct link with his land of origin – where he agreed to mount his own personal museum in Altomonte - and with the historic and cultural myths underlying it. A trip to his motherland, Magna Graecia, the Greater Greece, reveals to him the primordial spell of the ancient Mediterranean culture, surely after admiring the archaeological remains, the aesthetic ideal inspiring them, but most of all the basic concept at the origin of all the rest: the heathen cult of Nature, the pure pleasure derived from its perception. The Christian West has always maintained a bizarre attitude towards Nature: on the one hand, a deep admiration for God’s creation (just think of Saint Francis’ Lauds), but, on the other, it also has evident reservations over the pleasure of its perception, as if such a pleasure could invite to sin or deter from the real end, the worship of God. In ancient Greece, the man who best understood in philosophical terms the principle of Nature’s pleasure was Epicurus. And we well know how intense was the early Christian and medieval theologians’ ideological struggle against Epicurus, whom they deemed “amoral” and anti-spiritual.
I don’t know whether Azzinari’s wheat fields are deliberately “Epicurean”, but they would be seen from a more appropriate view if they were considered in a speculative dimension closer to Ancient Greece or Magna Graecia than to the Christian West. That is, I believe Azzinari has reached the core of the relationship between modernity and the ancient world, with a procedure not afar from Nietzsche’s. Only wonderful statues, only grand and imposing temples can evoke the Mediterranean world’s ancient culture. To catch it in its real essence, one must retrieve the principle of pleasure, with and within Nature, setting aside the moralistic hindrances of Christianity. For a Christian, to compare a man with an animal is a way to despise him, given that God wanted man to be the centre of the world. On the contrary, ancient mythology continually turns men into animals, without depriving them of their importance, as if to meet the need to feel a part of Nature, as an animal, or a plant. The wheat fields in themselves are perfectly suitable to prove the difference of views between heathen and Christian civilizations. In biblical and evangelical symbology, a wheat field is something positive, but the devil’s traps may hide within it. Azzinari’s seas of wheat, ancient and pre-Christian, are alien to such symbology. Nothing could lead to think that they may hide evil, whatever be its shape: no need for distinctions, we just have to catch the good in its entirety. Nothing could deny us the pure pleasure of contemplating them, without the sense of man’s detachment from the rest of Creation, but in a total identification with Nature. Nothing could provoke more peacefulness and delight, as if it were our existence’s yearned goal. In these paintings by Azzinari, nothing has a human dimension, but Nature’s, the wheat fields aren’t seen with human eyes, the horizon is barely perceived, the perspective is not mathematical or in Brunelleschi’s style. One could count each single spike, so close they appear, as it could never happen in real life. And the wind animates them as a spirit of Nature. The perspective of Azzinari’s “animated” fields reflects the view of a bird or an insect, high and low at the same time, to allow man to feel a bird among birds, an insect among insects, nature within Nature.
It’s amazing that this awareness, new and ancient at the same time, does not make us feel incomplete with respect to the privileged role that the Catholic doctrine offers us. Because, to say it with Spinoza, Deus can’t be but sive natura, with no other purpose but itself.