|
It was in Buenos Aires one year ago that I had a surprise encounter with Vito Campanella’s work at the MALBA Museum. Although surrealist art is in my bailiwick, I was glimpsing for the first time the work of a major artist—an entirely imaginary and fantastic world of creation crafted over more than half a century. Campanella’s oil paintings of enchanted women-mannequins, unicorns and bizarre faceless heads all came alive in front of me. I had to know more about him. |
 |
Vito Campanella: Surrealism & Metaphysics – Valery Oisteanu
It was in Buenos Aires one year ago that I had a surprise encounter with Vito Campanella’s work at the MALBA Museum. Although surrealist art is in my bailiwick, I was glimpsing for the first time the work of a major artist—an entirely imaginary and fantastic world of creation crafted over more than half a century. Campanella’s oil paintings of enchanted women-mannequins, unicorns and bizarre faceless heads all came alive in front of me. I had to know more about him.
Happily, the lavish monograph, Vito Campanella: Surrealism & Metaphysics, with scholarly text by Cesar Magrini, presents all the stages in the evolution of an artist from beginner to grand master. It also reveals a painter who dreams as a sculptor. His works often seem to be a detailed blueprint for some ideal dream-like or nightmarish sculptural ensemble.
Vito Campanella was born in 1932 near Bari, Italy, and educated at Academy of Breta Fine Arts in Milan. He studied for two years with Giorgio de Chirico and for eight months with Salvador Dali in Milan. Vito considers both of them to be his mentors. Yet, when I recently asked him who had the greatest influence on his palette, he answered without hesitation: "Caravaggio!" Later in his career, he immigrated to Argentina to reunite with his family, who had left earlier.
In 1955, when he joined the South American modernist movement, his paintings were more in an abstract-surrealist vein: as in Aparicion Fantastica, in which disturbing, ghostly, shattered structures anticipate death, fear and solitude. The technical dexterity of these works disturbs the viewer and demands a philosophical participation. Campanella introduced the textures of ruins in his objects (just like Dali used decay to emphasize the fleeting elements of life). His paintings often contain a dialectical balance between the menacing object and live flesh united.
In the 60s, figurative elements become more prevalent in Campanella’s output. Crisis, for example, depicts an unevenly winged, semi-mechanical dove sitting on a jagged surface in a harsh landscape. In Entre Bambalinas, a female mannequin steps out of the canvas, becoming an independent character under the gaze of other, painted people. Such work begs the question: What is an image? The artist asks this continuously by painting a painting in a painting. Can “It” be alive as an image? Or is it a hybrid, an assemblage of objects and prostheses that forms, say, breasts with eyes instead of nipples, reminiscent of Magritte?
Paradoxe Sublime is a woman’s face chiseled from wood, slightly covered by a hand sporting an eye and wood hair resembling roots. This is a three-dimensional, mythical world, a mindscape in a landscape from a painter who absorbed equally European metaphysics from de Chirico, repressed surrealist desires from Dali and the populism of Argentine culture, as in El gaucho Martin Fierro. In Campanella’s version, Fierro is a noble patriarch from the Pampas, a defender of justice for gauchos and a fighter against the Indians; golden prairies and skilled horsemen prove that he loves his adopted country.
Vito Campanella’s oneiric fantasies exploded in the prolific period from 1971 to 1980.
The alchemy series, "Vida Astral,” represents the stages of life as exemplified by four shadowy characters with spheres instead of heads. These strange aliens are carrying wooden barrels: one full of clouds, the others with small barren trees evolving into a decorative, thriving plant.
Also in this period, Campanella created a series called "Cosmic Musicians,” where string instruments have no strings and half-human, half-alien characters play cosmic music conveying a nostalgia and sadness. His visualizations of psychological portraits, in a plastic contemporary form, were made in a language that is decipherable to everyone. It is a category of pop-surrealism for the masses and elite alike.
Referring to his "Great Masters" series, Campanella points out that "Art is the memory of centuries, the voice still alive when others have been silenced. Each work of art has its own unique and substantial language stemming from everlasting realms. Today, I wish to retrace the great masters’ steps and, resorting to my painting, start an unrealizable dialogue. Their language is the burning symbiosis of voices from two ages."
Campanella’s drawings can be compared with those of Renaissance painters, and even if his palette usually favors cool colors, the result is definitely warm in its motifs and romantic narrative. He searches for the soul and marvelously describes myths, legends, heroic deeds and other spiritual adventures. At the ripe age of 75, Campanella is an international art-master with prizes from Italy, France, Argentina, Uruguay and the United States. His recent one-man exhibit in Sao Paulo, Brazil, was a great success.
Today, he is painting 15 new works in his studio on Avenida Cordoba in Buenos Aires for an exhibit in Monte Carlo this October through November. More beautiful women and horses materialize from leather and flesh in his paintings, carved or assembled by the uncontrolled, subconscious desires of a unique artist who is still unsurpassable.
It’s all in this magnificent book: which reveals a universe in which chance is all-powerful and logic non-existent, shapes oscillate between two-dimensional and multidimensional, wood mannequins engage in love making or looking in the mirror to discover their human elements.
