BLURRED

"Each and every artist has his or her little obsessions and Enrico Minguzzi cultivates his own stubbornly and silently, mainly by the use of a medium that is ancient and undying: painting. Minguzzi is, in fact, a pure painter, that is to say one who deeply scrutinizes the history of images, who constantly devotes himself to the formal and conceptual development of painting and who reinterprets the ways in which this art has manifested itself over the centuries. There is a particular desire that in my opinion animates every painter-painter, whether or not s/he is aware of it, which is to find his/her own pathway among the many that have been mapped and carved out over the centuries, while trying to expand the frontiers, and to make his/her own small addition. These are, for the most part, infinitesimally small advances and I am not even sure that we can really speak of advances as such, but rather of displacements that can entail deviations, as well as movements to the side or even backwards. I must admit that I find it almost touching to witness this ongoing search, and the attempts that are made to travel these short distances in a personal and original way.

I feel that the tiny moves that Enrico Minguzzi is making are going in the direction of a partnership between various divergent pictorial traditions. This is, in any case, what can be detected in the series of paintings that the artist is exhibiting in the former convent of San Francesco, all of which have been produced over the last two years. At first glance they seem to be still lifes, a genre that was particularly prominent in Italian and European Baroque art in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Apparently realistic natural elements are placed in the centre of the composition, often resting on supports that look like vases or dishes, while the backgrounds are always left rather indistinct and undefined. These paintings are pervaded by an almost humanist dimension, and here we can see a coexistence of various different artistic genres or traditions: to the Baroque still life, a sense of centrality and grace has been added that seems to derive from paintings of the second half of the fifteenth century. When I look at Minguzzi’s paintings, I am reminded of the calm immobility and stasis of fifteenth-century painting (and it is surely no coincidence that his favourite paintings include the Ideal Cities, otherwise known as the Urbino Perspectives). Minguzzi’s creations immediately bring to my mind the striking and almost metaphysical detail of the egg that hands suspended in the upper part of Piero della Francesca’s Brera Madonna. I am not only referring to the work (Fior d’uovo) in which Minguzzi actually represents an egg, but to his tendency towards compositional equilibrium, his attention to detail (as seen for example in the importance he gives to shadows) and to the interesting fact that his subjects can almost always be contained inside an oval shape.

But there is also a source of perturbation within all this apparently placid stillness, because an obstinate and tenacious attraction to the Sublime pulsates below the surface of Minguzzi’s paintings, although it is perhaps not immediately perceptible. This latent tension emerges above all in the subjects, after all, can you recognize the precise species of plants in these artworks? Could you give a particular name to those mineral concretions? And what is that phosphorescent glow with which these strange figures seem to vibrate? We are used to thinking of the Sublime in terms of the landscape, but in this case there is no high peak dominating us, nor an enveloping wild nature that surrounds us. In Minguzzi’s work the Sublime appears in the mysterious forms of those vegetal elements and stones that seem to imitate “the rude rocks, the mossy caverns, the irregular unwrought grottos […] with all the horrid graces of the wilderness itself”, that fascinated Anthony Ashley Cooper, the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, as described in his 1709 essay The Moralists: A Philosophical Rhapsody (as quoted by Umberto Eco). However, to answer the questions posed above, Minguzzi’s subjects are always the result of an invention, a projection and a “mental discourse” . They may look like flowers and mineral accretions, but they don’t exactly correspond to anything that actually exists in nature. I believe that this is another aspect of Minguzzi’s fascination for the Romantic dimension, as his relationship with nature is not based on a calm objective viewpoint, but rather on the observation of dramatic mutations that are taking place (in an introductory text of to a group exhibition including Minguzzi’s work the artist Nicola Samorì wrote of “distortions of forms that come about in the balance between contemplation and struggle”, and I feel that this definition is very pertinent to the artist’s approach).

It is perhaps for this reason that Minguzzi does without preparatory sketches or references taken from the real world (although he once told me that “giving up photography as the starting point of my painting was like removing the stabilizers from a child’s bicycle”). This led to the evident paradox that in moving away from the direct representation of existing things, his images seem remarkably credible, tangible and “true”. The overall effect is that of an eccentric “hyper-unrealism”, which gives physical consistency to fictitious subjects. This particularly original aspect of Minguzzi’s practice is, in some ways, unsettling, all the more so in a context – the geographical area around Ravenna – where in recent decades an artistic scene has developed (above all in the field of photography) which is inextricably linked to the close observation of the surrounding landscapes. Minguzzi’s works definitely do not conform to this tradition, as they display a Romantic need and impulse, a distancing from surrounding reality, and a search for coordinates other than the rather flat and placid landscapes of the Romagna region.

If I had to find a more pertinent point of reference, or genius loci, for Minguzzi’s art, I might think of the Fiasca con fiori (Wine Flask with Flowers) in the Municipal Art Gallery of Forlì, a prodigious 17th century still life in which the padded straw covering or sheath of the wine carafe, which has become a vase for flowers, is represented with exceptional precision and exactness. The same kind of attention to detail is typical of Minguzzi’s works. The elements that support his subjects function as plinths or pedestals (for example in Voluta), which tend to emphasize the plastic and three-dimensional appearance of his paintings. Their structure points towards the pleasure in invention that is so evident in all Minguzzi’s paintings: those vases and plates might really exist, but the artist does not seem to refer to any specific example. In some cases these supports are almost transparent, taking the form of strange containers, like alchemists’ alembics and stills (as in Fiore freddo), but in other cases they seem to have dissolved and become incorporated within the subject, like creepers of ivy that take possession of the ruins upon which they grow and thrive (as in Messidoro).

Another relevant aspect of Minguzzi’s paintings is that of their backgrounds. Often devoid of any marked spatial indications, they look like vaporous and atmospheric theatre stages, as if they contained in a nutshell the dramatic brooding turmoil typical of nineteenth-century Romantic landscapes. I might be exaggerating, but I like to consider these backdrops as a reinterpretation of what for centuries were the settings for still lifes. The subtle and yet somehow inevitable shadows to the sides of Minguzzi’s subjects remind me of the sort of airy halo forming the background of Édouard Manet’s famous painting Le Fifre (“The Fifer” or “Young Flautist”) and that Michel Foucault described as follows: “There is nothing to serve as a place where he positions his feet except this very light shadow. It’s definitely a shadow, it’s definitely nothing at all, it’s definitely the void on which he places his feet”. In contrast to this rather subtle and inconspicuous feature, the fluorescent green edges that often run around the frames of Minguzzi’s works appear even more conspicuous. This is not just a layer of paint added at a later moment, but the luminous ground or foundation of the paintings, which sometimes seems to shine through to produce a sort of mysterious glow and an almost pulsating aura."

Saverio Verini