The Green Paintings of Lucio Pozzi
Daniel Rothbart
Lucio Pozzi’s new paintings are green. They are the green of pastures, apples,
moss, and clovers, but they are also the green of oceans, emeralds, envy, jade,
tea leaves, and the goddess Tara. Pozzi welcomes diverse interpretations of and
associations from the Green Paintings in much the same that he refuses to limit
his production to any particular genre or style. Some time ago, Pozzi devised
a period table of art, which includes all of the elements from which a work of
art can be produced. It is chart of ingredients that can be combined to achieve
different effects. For the Green Paintings he combined green with improbable
chromatic bedfellows along with heavy impasto and the device of visually dividing
his compositions at midpoint from top to bottom with a horizontal line.
Compositionally, Pozzi’s Green Paintings rely on dynamic quadrants, much
like fields from his chart of art ingredients. The quadrants are defined by bands
of parallel cross-hatching applied with a palette knife in colors ranging from
blue to gray to ochre (always over green). The four bands, on top and bottom
each define a rectangular field of the green ground in their center. These schematic
divisions reflect Pozzi’s more analytic side. But there must be a healthy
measure of landscape in the paintings as well. Perhaps the central line is a
horizon and the lower register reflects the higher like water in a lake reflects
fields and hills above. As a child, Pozzi was quarantined for malaria in his
house in Milan but he would escape by painting fantastic landscapes. When the
9.11 attacks took place, minutes from his studio, Lucio Pozzi responded by painting
a beautiful landscape with mimosa, which he painted repeatedly as a visual mantra.
Like Paul Cézanne’s varied but consistent paintings of Mont Saint-Victoire,
Pozzi’s Green Paintings combine natural observation with a highly personal
geometry and emotional intensity.
If there is an
antecedent for the Green Paintings in Pozzi’s oeuvre it is the Rag Rug series.
The latter title refers to those carpets sewn together from remnants of varied
fabric that one often sees in the country. When Pozzi speaks of this work he
speaks of process and emotion, and the innevitable dialogue between these two
elements. Like the Green Paintings, Rag Rug Paintings make use of impastoed,
striated bands of cross-hatching (in various colors) that intersect over the
picture plane. The artist views painting them as an exercise in Zen detachment
and attentiveness combined, at times, with a more emotional involvement akin
to Jazz improvisation. Similarly in the Green Paintings one senses a dynamic
tension between conflicting desires to rhapsodize with color and paint and the
will to impose structure.
When one looks
at the paintings, at least for a moment, one thinks of cultivated fields seen
from above. Looking down from an airplane one can admire verdant rows of seedlings
and view parcels of farmland distinct from one another in the orientation and
variety of their plantings. But this desire to view topography is subverted by
the horizontal division. It is Pozzi’s artifice that calls you back into
the realm of abstract painting. Similarly, the geometry of each painting softly
diffuses into the ground at its edges. Each of the paintings is a gestalt resulting
in more than the sum of its parts (even if they are drawn from Pozzi’s own
chart). More than palette, geometry, impasto, or landscape, each canvas is a
world unto itself which rewards the viewer with its nuanced pictorial exploration
of new visual territory.
From May 1 through
June 7, Lucio Pozzi’s Green Paintings will be on view at the Marvelli Gallery
at 526 West 26th Street in New York City. Tel. 212-627-3363.
