For the exhibition at Palazzo Farnese, Piacenza
Robert Carroll, inside and outside the infinite
"/ cannot bring a world quite round,
Although I patch it as I can "
WALLACE STEVENS
From "The man with the blue guitar"
There is a close relationship and a link of interdependence, in the artistic story of Robert Carroll, between his abstract painting of the Sixties and that sort of highly personal, internalizing figurative,
which nowadays is offered like a telescope lens whose aim is to discover nature, intended as everything that surrounds us, big or small, manifest or hidden, but always, and regardlessly, present around us. It is our finite and infinite universe, known and impenetrable, like those natural backgrounds closed in among rough flashes in certain paintings by Mathis Grunewald. Since Carroll started painting – practically since he was born - he has been scrutinizing the inscrutable, aided in this by his double cultural expertise: the scientific knowledge which he acquired in his studies of physics, and his artistic
ability, the innate gift of being able to transfer his emotions, his reflections or his moods on to a canvas or sheets of a sketch-book using only a pencil. The chapters of this story, which has continued for nearly fifty years, can be connected with an Indian belief that speaks of a sacred mountain and a place called "the navel of the world".
kiva_grand canyon
THE INDIAN LEGEND
It may seem to be a paradox, but the pictorial birth of Carroll has an arcane analogy with the cosmological synthesis of the ancient Anasazi cultures that populated the wide-open spaces of the North American continent. In their territory, religiously hidden from those who were not worthy to leam its; location, the forefathers of the Apache and Sioux tribes protected the "navel of the world", the sacred place of access to the mother earth. Equally sacred was a mountain which gave access to the universe, a window that opens on the infinite, a point of no return? Not for Carroll, whose spirit was fascinated by this way of conceiving of man inside the universe. Carroll has lived in Italy since September 1959, but he has always kept the land of America and its infinite spaces in his heart. As he told me about his discovery in the enormous parks of the United States, sitting comfortably in front of a steaming cappuccino, I imagined him intent on exploring those natural monuments, where the wild mingles with the poetic, and places that are still inaccessible succeed in taking away your breath, and I could picture him down on a rocky terrace, watching the horizon falling away below him in a spectacular complex of eroded sandstone, amid many-coloured plateaux and deep incisions which are the result of millions of years of pressure and counterpressure, faults, and upsurges. In search of the places of the Indian legend.
OUTSIDE THE UNIVERSE: THE CONCEPT AND THE ABSTRACT
In December 1960, Carroll held the first exhibition of his works at the Pogliani Gallery in via Gregoriana in Rome. These were the years of the concept and abstraction, the desire to go beyond the infinite. When he speaks of his artistic experience of this period, he prefers not to define it as informal, particularly if this word is used to indicate the current of abstractism which underlines the importance of the accidental in the formation of the work of art. In Carroll nothing has ever been accidental, neither then nor nowadays. His works of those years were exclusively based on the autonomous language of forms and colors, without seeking any correspondence with objective reality or with the facts of sensible experience, even if Carroll was probably already painting with the nature of Versilia or the Roman Campagna in his mind's eye, without taking it into consideration in the definition of the picture, except in the modulation of the color. In his paintings of this period, there is a desire to go beyond the visible. The dashes of color seem to be atoms in movement, invisible particles made visible in the painting, which becomes the place where impulses converge, which then start out from there towards the infinite, and even today, in observing these paintings, the eye is struck by a new movement. These works have not lost any of their original freshness, the pictorial composition still pulsates and vibrates with the "sacred fire" that has never gone out. They were a trampoline, like the top of the sacred mountain of the Anasazi. A point of no return towards the artistic unknown, towards the infinite, a symbol of the universality that can be found only outside space and time. A window on the inscrutable.
INSIDE THE UNIVERSE: NATURE
But time runs on inexorably. Two decades. The Eighties and the Nineties arrive, leaving the winds of change of 1968behind them. And impulsiveness becomes reflection. Increasingly inside the Universe... inside Earth... inside Nature. The beginning and the end... and then the beginning again, the desire to start again and again. Thus Carroll opens up to a highly particular figurative, arriving at atmospheres which at first sight may seem to be almost unreal, but which are not unreal, because they lead directly to the essence of places, giving us a sense of belonging to things, which we had forgotten. It seems that the artist is saying that art is the sign of the human capacity to understand and to know, and thus it is also a reflection of the beauty of nature. It opens up our sight to new horizons, and to the awareness that stems from wonder Carroll looks at the infinite of the universe, and at the same time he looks inside himself, and his expressive journey follows its slow progression, in its real course and in its artistic reproduction. The difficult thing is not to look at things, but to see them as they really are, from inside. Carroll looks at nature and sees what others are unable to see: this attitude comes from his rationality, but also from his spirit, and it leads him, regularly, to search for the intrinsic meaning of being. Florence, Rome, Ronchi, the American parks, every place becomes familiar for the person who is able to appreciate its most intimate aspects and its hidden secrets. The stars that are swallowed up at night on the horizon by the Grand Canyon, marked out at its bottom by the flow of the Colorado, are the same as the ones in those skies that touch the distantly visible skyline of a hill in our Apennines. They are the signal that nature exists and that we are all a part of it, and all we can do is admire it, in silence. And wonder becomes emotion, and thought becomes poetry. In this way, the experience and sensibility of a painter act as a means to discover the beauty of everything that surrounds us. Carroll allows us to gain a perception of the immensity of existence and the great mystery of life, which he observes and describes with a lay religiousness, which is both discreet and ever-present. He is artistically mature, not only from a pictorial point of view, but also from an existential one. Carroll is now over sixty: every experience, every visit, every chance to see places or to meet personalities, to amplify, if possible, his cultural breadth, has been fixed in his memory, and also in his spirit, which has been built up on his own experience, transforming it into a precious treasure, which he now shares with us through his art, stimulating us to widen our perception, not only visually.
IN THE COSMOS: MAN
Now Carroll turns to the depths of the silent, immense Cosmos, which swallows us up at its thought. The galaxies, the breath of the universe, and in the end... still man. This is a search which knows no limits. Because the point that was to have been that of no return leads us back to man, the chief beneficiary of Creation, which he does not succeed in examining in all its parts, but whose infinite greatness he can appreciate, thanks to the equally infinite, inscrutable gift that is his intellect. But Carroll does not seek man's glory; on the contrary, the things that most strike him are those that are most simple, and humble. Even in his series of incisions dedicated to the Song of the Creatures, he does not forget the least of them, and dedicates one work in the cycle to Liza, the slave who died as a free woman at the age of 118, in a house in Georgia where she lived for more than a hundred years after being kidnapped at the age of 12 from her tribe in Africa. But Lisa has not disappeared for ever, swallowed up by the forgetfulness of nothingness. In every particle of the universe, there is the presence of each one of us, our experience, our being… nothing is destroyed, atoms and energy that combine and enter into play once again. Everything is continually changing, and everything is transformed into something else. Heraclites “panta rhei” returns in the continual transformation of Carroll.In the flow of time, in life which becomes death and then returns to life again, in the memory of a friend who is no longer, who through his thought becomes a part of each of those who have known him. And in the slow stream of existence, the mind and the heart, which are never lost. That half-Scottish, half-Irish blood that flows through his veins has kept him firm is his convictions, and intolerant towards false displays and commonplaces. His transatlantic birth has given him – besides an unmistakable Yankee accent – a curiosity, amazement and almost adolescent emotion at every new discovery. Lastly, his sojourn in his new Mediterranean homeland has helped him consolidate his pleasure for simple things and the beautiful - such as a good glass of red wine with friends, or the tonifying emotion of the sight of a painting by Caravaggio in the shadow of an unknown sacristy - together with the free spirit of the Renaissance man. And his continual wonder. Wonder at the enchantment of life, wonder at the miracle of everyday existence. Our eyes reveal to us everything that surrounds us, but it is up to our senses to appreciate every nuance. Even the sounds, the noises, the smells, the atmospheres enter into play in Carroll's works, and are a part of his daily arcane: "When I start a painting he told us during one of his stays in Piacenza - it's a bit like the primordial chaos, it's a boiling magma, I let myself be guided by the painting, by the incandescent mass, to discover a new reality. Michelangelo said that every block of marble already contains its sculpture inside it, and likewise, every canvas already contains its painting". Thus once again, Robert has succeeded in giving us a present, of the most precious kind. He has aroused emotions in us, which, through his own thought reflected in his paintings, have become a part of our being, for ever.
CARLO FRANCOU
Director of the geological Museum of Castell’Acquato, Emilia Romagna, Italia
