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Of the East, de Courten loves the less investigated corners, the details caught between light and shadows, creating a metaphysical suspension towards which even the old manuscripts used as support are brought. I would like to discuss the work of de Courten on Papers: here the intimacy of the research in its sensitive report of the emotion is necessarily more direct without ever relying on the pure exhibition of emotional beats. Indeed precious, these Papers, intimate but conveying the same “word” of the oils, including because here we find again, performed with an intense look, the same pulsation of the matter of the world. An experience, that of Franco de Courten, to which – starting with this exhibition - the Italian art critics, I think, are persuadingly invited to give a new and specific attention. S.M.: “ You shall choose a theme and decline it with the shades of colour: the cycle of the reds, the yellows and violets. The knowledge of the shades has always been one of the distinctive characteristics of Courten’s painting. Born in 1932, he is renowned in the field of international abstract tradition.”
This peculiar dimension of his art work has developed as years went by, without ever losing a spontaneous and immediate excitement in face of reality, combined with the curiosity and the freshness of someone who is always ready to discover new feelings and new emotions. The need to line up the works as a “series”, which are added to a common matrix, corresponds to his most intimate inspirations and makes of him an absolutely unique artist in the current scenario. His painting is based on the idea of the mixture and the intersection; it may be the overlaying of the painting material over old papers or, on the contrary, the proposition within the painting context itself of abstraction and concreteness, of landscapes or graphical patterns, which correspond to each other, as an echo that emerges from the contemplation of the landscape of an environment and becomes a kind of intimate essence. Sensitive and rational at the same time, it is a figure of an artist to whom very few compare in this new stage of the painting at the start of the millennium.“ ...traveller who has seen and meditated, he reproduces his experience reluctantly progressing, controlling the sediments of accumulated images, which impetuously enter again in his extremely dense figurative weft..” Claudio Strinati, in Catalogue "Gardens", 2005 De Courten recreates what he has seen. He is attracted by all that is unlived in, un-looked after, all that has turned to stone and lost its life. Spanish
landscapes, Roman forums, sombre African scenes and gardens in Algiers,
the skylines of New York°all come to life and form blocks. As if
there were a race to synthesise everything, to sum it up, to concentrate
and condense images. And very little changes from a structural point
of view as wherever de Courten is, he seems to peer deeply into
his landscapes. He appears to do so secretly, picturing them with
precision, framing and dissecting them, literally seeing into them,
between them, through them, across the scenery, beyond the faulty,
unsound curtains of the stage, the obstacles and walls. It all appears
part of a never-ending defence of the act of dissection, of the
act of spying, splitting and cracking. When
faced with the works of Franco de Courten my thoughts often drift
back to a text by Cesare Brandi (Segno e immagine, [Sign and Image]
Il Saggiatore,1960) and to the two moments he identified as the
origin of two different paths of evolution. The author pointed out
that, given the fact that differences are never based on rigorously
divided historical settings, in certain cases there is a need to
interpret how sign interferes with image and vice-versa. Just as
time and history have seen the birth of unexpected periods of fascinating
and radical development. Moreover, I cannot exclude a degree of
similarity with some such cases from the emotions and impressions
I feel when looking at de Courten's pictures. Even if sign and image
are, at the base, one and the same thing and only reason, conscience
and awareness push them in two different directions. Franco
de Courten is a painter - and this he has proved to us - who does
not seek to escape from facing the places in which he lives. On
the contrary, it is a form of total immersion into the very structure
and logic - in other words into the most deep-rooted 'culture' -
of the countryside, of the cities and of the nations that he knew
and 'lived' that served him as the most thorough and complete point
of inspiration for a precise pictorial awareness. It
is fairly easy to understand who Franco de Courten's ideal models
were and to see who and what he admired, from Klee to De Staïl to
Afro. He was clear and determined in his choices and decisions.
However, he never granted particular interest or importance to group
styles and strategies. Nor did he ever give in to the temptation
of moving with the times or of calculated shifts in style. What
truly stands out and sets him apart is his extreme sincerity. His
subject matters are the fruit of what surrounds him, of the natural
environment in which he lives with such passion, such participation,
with such vigour and confidence. And, with what may appear an obstinate
form of naivety, he continually strives to unite the fervent emotions
that life transmits to him to an ideal model of abstract purity
born from his mind and imagination. De
Courten paints mainly on boards whose surfaces are made irregular
by complex collages of randomly layered card and paper that end
up creating a rugged backing veined by countless tiny streaks that
resemble the cracks found in the soil and earth and which allow
colours to be exploited in remarkable, complex manners.
Although the language used is abstract, it is based on clearly defined
emotions and relationships very much linked to reality; an original
way of blending the need to transcribe visual experiences without
stepping away from an awareness of the evolution of modern art;
from the use of untraditional, innovative materials as a means of
expression, to the ellipse in language, to the urge to take a distance
from that form of passive subjection before the object in hand.
The final outcome is an act of synthesis and concentration, characterised
by a sense of naturalness that is never intellectual even where
numerous significant examples of culture and style are recalled,
and stimulated by research into unusual iconography, evoked in a
harmonious marriage between cultural awareness and purity of expression. It
seems to me that his works can be appreciated far more as a collection,
together, rather than singularly. What grants a touch of charm to
his creations and makes them so fascinating is a very subtle and
hardly perceptible shift in mood. These minute variations are similar
to music in the way they accentuate an ongoing theme, creating variations
in tone and emphasis that shed a different light on it, making it
appear new but without ever suppressing its original characteristics. |