Mariannita Luzzati

“On Mariannita Luzzati, and Landscape Painting in General”
by Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro

Mariannita Luzzati has stated that, “painting is something that takes time.” As self-evident as this statement might seem, it contains an important key to her work, particularly if we consider time not only in terms of the application of paint on canvas to construct an image, but also the time required for perception. Luzzati shares with many contemporary artists a desire for slowness, a need to apply the brakes on the rapid speed with which we perceive the world around us and draw conclusions. At the end of almost a century of modern art, few artists still believe that art can, in itself, contain a key to enlightenment and knowledge. Instead, the challenge today seems to be more along the lines of resisting the redundancy with which images become banal. In order to do this, the artist works to de-familiarize the everyday, trying to pry open a space between perception and understanding, between the object and its accepted name.

When looking at one of Luzzati’s canvases we experience a double sensation of familiarity and surprise. While the paintings are extremely convincing in their evocation of places, climates, and atmosphere, we are also simultaneously aware of their artifice, of their ‘unnatural’ color and contrast.This alternation between the seduction of the image and our awareness of its construction creates a productive friction that depends as much on our desire to believe the image as on our need to understand how it was constructed. The images effectively switch between both sides of the brain, drawing on the resources of each. Although Luzatti’s work has largely been discussed in terms of its subject matter, I would argue that more important is its articulation of three related, but apparently contradictory concepts: knowledge, belief, and desire.

Since its origins, painting has been tied intrinsically to belief. The creation of illusion through image requires a covenant between artist and viewer in which both agree to suspend disbelief for long enough to believe that what they see on a canvas is a representation of something in the world. This covenant seems to live in the very DNA of painting; even painterly abstraction, despite its claims to start from a tabula rasa, is in its denial a tacit acknowledgment of this origin. Abstraction and painting have always had a tense relationship, although ironically painting has been the Holy Grail of abstractionists, the ultimate battleground for the soul of art. To find a productive project within the inevitable ‘contamination’ of painting requires both courage and a certain modesty, two elements that are immediately visible in Luzatti’s works.

Once we understand the role of painting to be more akin to that of a negotiator between artist and audience, we can begin to think of the specific communication that is generated. As Ernst Gombrich wrote with characteristic clarity, “ What a painter inquires into is not the nature of the physical world but the nature of our reactions to it. […] His [sic] is a psychological problem – that of conjuring up a convincing image despite the fact that not one individual shade corresponds to what we call ‘reality’.” In this sense, each painting is a platform on which prior knowledge, expectations and construction play a game of visibility and invisibility, mediating between the artist and the viewer. Luzzati’s landscapes, although based on specific places, are sufficiently abstracted as to invite in any number of references and memories. As viewers, we feel that we have ‘been there before,’ that the places are familiar to us, and thus, through their lack of specificity, they speak to our individual experiences, our personal recollections and therefore our psychological makeup. What is remarkable is that, unlike other forms of ‘psychological’ art, there is no explicit program or message in this work; we have no sense that the artist wanted to tell us any specific one thing. Instead, she provides a stimulus at exactly the right point between showing us something, and letting us see.

In his pioneering study of the psychology of perception, Richard Wollheim discusses what he calls “seeing in” as one of the intrinsic qualities of painting. “Seeing in” is the process through which the human mind projects form and meaning onto ambiguity. The most common example is how we see forms in the clouds, or Leonardo da Vinci’s advice to young artists to look for shapes in the soot left by fire. In all these cases, ambiguity stimulates the imagination in a way that pure representation (illustration) does not. It is here, according to Wollheim, that art creates communication with the mind. In Wollheim’s model, the artist must tread the fine line between precision and vagueness, so that the viewer can see something familiar, yet still has to exercise imagination to complete the work. Landscape is a particularly fertile genre for seeing in, as every representation must go through a process of generalization and abstraction in order to transfer the infinite pieces of information that exist in nature into a relatively small painted surface. We could even go so far as to say that the history of landscape painting is the story of this negotiation between reality and fiction, in which Claude, Ruysdael, Post, Poussin, Turner, Constable, Cézanne, and so many others mark different points within a continual discussion between generality and specificity.

To make it clear, the generality of landscape painting is different from abstraction as we commonly understand it. Abstraction is the exercise of analyzing a form and subjecting it to a process of reduction in order to discover a greater truth. In the Western tradition abstraction is intrinsically linked to Platonic ideas of an archetypical world in which our perceptions are imperfect versions of a purer world that exists in the mind (or the spirit in later versions). Following this model, the true artist, to paraphrase the title of a famous Bruce Nauman work, helps the world by revealing mystic truths. In the landscape tradition, however, this search for abstraction takes a slightly different route. While still life was the favored genre in early modernism for exploring abstraction through a concentration on modest objects seen closely (Picasso, Mondrian, Matisse), landscape remained slightly marginal, perhaps because of its history of ambiguity in negotiating the relationship between reality and fiction, without ever taking an extreme position on either side. When the battle lines were drawn in the early 20th century between abstraction and figuration, the landscape tradition was to a certain extent condemned to be neither one nor the other. This in-between status is perhaps what has made landscape a viable subject again in a post-modern sensibility, not as an antiquarian revival, but as a continuation and recovery of ambiguity and uncertainty as a central subject in art.

If ambiguity is the central element in the landscape tradition, Luzzati exploits this fully through her subject and technique. At a technical level, her many layers of thin oil paint create an optical diffraction in which borders and edges are slightly blurred and undefined, as though seen through a light mist, or at twilight. In her print works, a similar effect is created on the printing plate so that the ink seems to float just above the paper. The effect is one of a liminal landscape, a frozen moment of transition and uncertainty in which the stable world seems about to dissolve into light and movement. As the specific contours become vague, and topographical details start to fade, she creates a situation in which the overall sense of the landscape overtakes its details; the mood becomes predominant. Luzzati’s works, in this regard, have a close relationship to the series of ‘nocturnes’ by James McNeill Whistler, in which we see a similar generalization of form in favor of close tonal harmonies. Another parallel might be found in Piet Mondrian’s early Dutch landscapes where the transitory light of dusk also seems to be de-materializing and de-familiarizing the everyday objects in the paintings. Both of these artists share a deeply Romantic spirit, but one that is anti-heroic. Unlike the dramatic romanticism of Turner’s mid-career paintings, these are images of deep modesty, of a quiet contemplation of the end of a day, rather than the assertion of a bright or tragic tomorrow. This is not to say that Luzzati’s paintings are pessimistic, but they do create a certain poetic melancholy, a certain saudade perhaps.

All representation in art is based on the principle of conjuring, of creating an illusion that the viewer can, at some level, believe. The root of the work conjure is con (with) + jure (swear). In other words, only when we agree to state something together, can anything be conjured. This collective nature of illusion is often overlooked, but points to a level of communal trust in order to communicate through images. The artist is therefore responsible not just to his or her own vision, but to a social covenant through which representation is negotiated. This is how icons and images circulate through our society, and the tricky job for the artist is to live within this consensus, while trying to expand it at the same time. We are all familiar with the dramatic ways in which images have been repurposed throughout art history to force this rupture and test the limits of knowledge. We might ask ourselves if this desire for novelty is sustainable today, when the advertising industry seems so much more adept than many artists at manipulating and adapting images and their content. I would argue that the work of Mariannita Luzzati suggests a way forward in this regard. Rather than working to conjure images, this work conspires through image. The origin of the verb conspire is con (with) + spirare (breath): to breath together. So rather than creating a situation in which we believe an image, we allow ourselves to breath with the image in a more intimate, one-on-one experience.

To spend time with one of Luzzati’s canvases is to allow time to flow, for the gaze to travel slowly across and into the image, bringing with it recollections, sensations, and a constant switching between familiarity and discovery. Nothing could be further from illustration, in which knowledge is presented passively for consumption. Instead Luzzati’s work opens the doors to a more productive and engaged relationship between the artist, the artwork and the viewer, in which each creates a codependency of meaning and of intention, a sharing of experience and expectation. Here, perhaps, lies the radical modesty of her work

***
[1] “Essa coisa de pintura sempre requer tempo”, quoted in Paulo Herkenhoff, “Mariannita Luzzati: O vigor delicado e a disciplina da pintura,” in Ocupações: Mariannita Luzzati (Vila Velha: Museu Vale do Rio Doce, 2006), 21.
[2] E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000), 49.
[3] See Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987).

“The Visible Corroded”
by Agnaldo Farias Translated by Andrew Hahn

“el mundo es unas cuantas tiernas imprecisiones”
‘The world is made of tender imprecisions”
Jorge Luis Borges

What do these paintings by Mariannita Luzzati expect from us?

We have come to the same way we come to each thing in this world, armed with the desidere and the question which will take us to its secret interior what are they? But suddenly the impulse id clouded and followed by a collapse of the gaze. At first we thought we could figure them out; somehow, from a distance, we made out scenes and landscapes. But now we are haunted by the suspicion that another order is in vigor, something which annuls our certainty of the path we were treading. All familiarity pulls back in a dizzying flash, without so much as a brief pause, without allowing for the finishing touch de a horizon line or anything else capable of stemming the expansion de the abyss which is yawning open in front of us. After this, a stranger reversal occurs: it is as if we were not the ones who contemplated them-they contemplated us. The complicity is fractured, that old binomial, subject-object, with which we had kept the other under control, is dismantled. Each of these paintings provokes a contradictory experience within us, where the stammering of the senses is confused with the magnetism which attracts us to its extensive and imprecise surfaces.

Since its beginning, the wore of Mariannita Luzzati has focused on the discussion de the vigor of representational painting, figurative within the problematic contemporary visuality; that is, a use of figuration capable of withstanding the crisis of modern thinking’s presuppositions, but at the same time, without incurring regressive movements which would take it race to a pre-modern stage. What is surprising are the results which she has achieved in such a reduced space of time while operating in such a conflictive zone. From this perspective, the spectator of visual arts who does not have a greater enoledoe of the brazilian artistic panorama should gear in mind that, besides her attributes as an artist, there is the excellence of an achievement uncommon for a country with little pictorial tradition such as ours. Mariannita Luzzati benefits from the internal discussion which this dilemma has prompted in our midst.

In this sense, the situation of the debate over pictorial production, sub-sector of a more vast field relative not only to the other means of expression but which also includes the participation of the critics and the institutional sphere, has as one of its more substantial fronts that which strives to consolidate the modern legacy, whether by examining and rereading its basic references, or by adhering to the infolding of neo-concrete production and to the conceptualism of the seventies. It is worth noting that this position was considerably strengthened after the tranvanguard and in neoexpressionist wave which swept through here in the early eighties, a rather illustrative moment in showing to what extreme one may go to through the sloppy and phrenetic importation of languages which in themselves are questionable, and are even more so in their derivative versions.

If the defense of modern pretexts by a significant fraction of our artistic milieu makes sense in a country where the continuity of the intellectual debate is frequently truncated whether due to political exception or simply because the enthusiasm for novelty suffocates the interest for knowledge – it should be added that its principal merit is the fact that it possesses the best of our production, however, the same cannot be said of the emerging generation aligned with this aesthetic position, which often produces time works, overly obedient to its canons and which, as a result, react a everything that does not explicitly reiterate the wore of art’s self referentiality and other correlated points.

Mariannita Luzzati enlists herself in this panorama, overcoming the dichotomy between figure and abstraction, approaching the visible symbol but never allowing it to be framed in by the accountant-like dimension of the spectator’s eye; so much allusive content is included that it ends up completely deteriorated, with no possibility of being reconstructed. Ever since i fist became aware of her wore i have accompanied her patient journey toward the destruction of visible symbols, which has been developing in direct in direct to her improvement in composing the pictorial field and in her increasingly pure treatment of chromatic material.

How can one register this process which is founded in the uncertain and ineffable, where the eye recognizes its precariousness? The with holding of words would be the coherent attitude, however, they bloom to annunciate a method which is known to be imaginary: the possible theme possible because nothing can be affirmed, they are words in suspension – the possible fragment of a landscape seems to have been plunged into a quadrilateral liquid: the canvas. The liquid, as well as the landscape, possesses colors which tend to mingle with each either and with the colors given off by the body of represented entities. All ape slowly advancing on a smooth sea but only up to a certain point. There is a stage beyond which they do not dare proceed because they would lose themselves in each other and cadge the loss of homogeneity, if not for fretful apprehension. Nevertheless. The prolonged infusion mortifies the outlines of the forms, reducing them to clouds, thus proving that there is a carnal dimension to the symbol, a memory of the lethargy of the represented objects which it keeps imprisoned in its interior. A living presence of water, land and rock which it constantly exhales, lief a wound that will not close.

But would it be right to speak of symbols? How can one designate that which cannot be retained, which floats in an air full of pauses, which is slightly beyond that which is understood? Perhaps this is the engine of our restlessness before these paradoxical paintings, visible yet imperceptible to the eye: despite being human creations, these displayed symbols betray the trust which we had put in them; we cannot grasp their meanings, we cannot even gay if they have any. Their meanings, if they have any, will be perpetually eclipsed, and while we are standing in front of them we will live on what id offered by their shadows, their tinted and diffused shadows.

A five step guide for observing the paintings of Mariannita Luzzati
by Allan Frankiel

1) When we speak of art, we think of the logic of the visible, but it is important to remember that for the artist the visible serves to discover what we usually do not perceive, what would, otherwise, remain invisible.
2) Blaise Pascal, the XVII century mathematician, physicist, philosopher and writer observed: “Human knowledge is similar to a sphere which ceaselessly grows, as its volume increases, thus enlarging its point of contact with the unknown.”.
3) In 1859, commenting on the Salon in Paris, Charles Baudelaire wrote: “From day to day, art diminishes its self-respect, prostrates itself before exterior reality, and the artist become more and more inclined to paint not what he dreams but what he sees…”.
4) Odilon Redon, the great colorist and visual mystic who fought every form of visual atrophy, said. “the artist will always have an innate sense for an organization of matter… In art, everything is done by docilely submitting to the arrival of the “unconscious”… Color is life itself, it annihilates the line with its rays… Dreams are populated with “visual logic” and the future belongs to the subjective world.”.
5) In Mariannita Luzzati’s paintings the forms are transposed and transformed –with their own creative logic- into the poetic world of the undetermined where all certitudes lie in dreams. We are projected into a world of an unrelenting visual imagination.