Faces Without belongings
By Raffaella Marano
Tommaso Guarino. Donna Vestita di Rosa (Woman dressed in Pink) Oil on Canvas
Last October, in Eboli, a town in the heart of south Italy, artist Tommaso Guarino opened "Senza Appartenenza" (Without Belongings), a fascinating exhibition of paintings from 2002 to the present.
Guarino has been painting since the 1960’s, and lives and works in Milan. In addition to painting, he is also a writer of theatrical text and narrative tales, including the renown trilogy entitled Io,Caterina e Pantaleo. His paintings read like narratives of the human spirit, portraying the journey of introspection. He travels back to his native city, to the memories of his land, his youth, and his innate passion for art. He paints as a testament to the importance of art for the subject’s sake; in every manifestation art is an ideal and generous instrument used to communicate the pains and joys of human living.
In his recent work, the faces of his personages seem removed from all the noise that encircles them. Ever sensitive to the internal conflicts of his subjects, he paints faces of women without betraying their age. This does not, however, negate their individuated character. Instead, his women gaze with large, solemn eyes, past the viewer, commanding us to gaze toward them. They are hypnotic and transfixing, instilling a sense of vertigo in the viewer and transporting us away from reality.
Guarinofixes figures in flat compositions, in a frontal pose, stripped to their essentialized self; his images reach beyond vanity and pretense. The women reveal the deep and unsurpassable melancholy of memory, and the weight of their personal histories.
These works are in full accordance with the philosophies of George Lukacs, a figurehead against the political control of aesthtics, who advised that the privilege of art is to provoke new and free emotions. Guarino successfully expresses the poetic pathos of these women, giving his paintings an underlying truth and lending his women a compassionate trustworthiness. These values imbue the work with an capacity to suspend the viewer’s mind from the uncontrollable race of the day to day.
