Guilherme Dearo

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Introduction

Artists represent spaces and places in different ways. One can create spaces, while other interact with them. An artist can paint where he was born, where he was raised, where he loved. If art is commonly found in a museum, it almost never begins there. Painting or drawing a landscape can be a representation of reality, but also can be an interpretation or even a creation of it.

One example is the painting “The Starry Night”, by Dutch painter VincentVan Gogh (1853–1890). Van Gogh’s most famous painting depicts a world-famous and well-known landscape … that does not exist. More precisely: it does not exist in that way. It depicts a starry night in the French town of Saint-Rémy, where Van Gogh resided at Saint-Paul asylum. But such view from his window wasn’t what we see in the canvas when we visit MoMA in New York.

Such representation reveals a landscape that is a mixture of various elements that goes beyond the limit of Van Gogh’s vision of his window in the asylum. It is more inspiration than reality. In the image, there is a mixture between real elements of nearby landscapes (cypresses, the village of Saint-Rémy and other communes, mountains from a nearby village) and elements of the painter’s imagination and memory.

Also in the mixture, the inner feelings of Van Gogh. The sky was not moving, but to him it was. “It’s much more an expression of the turmoil in the artist’s own imagination that he’s projecting onto that sky”, described MoMA’s curator Ann Temkin.

Why Giorgio De Chirico

Inspiration and reality: the work of Italian painter (born in Greece) Giorgio De Chirico (1888–1978) can also be described in that way. Here, I briefly comment about his painting “The Red Tower” (La Tour Rouge), one of my favorites. As in “The Starry Night,” real elements and fictional construction blend together to create the landscape of “The Red Tower”.

The path to “The Red Tower”

That painting is part of the Pittura Metafisica (Metaphysical Art) moment, a movement from the 20th century modern art mainly found between 1911 and 1920 in the works of De Chirico and also in the works of painters such as Carlo Carrà and Giorgio Morandi. De Chirico sought, with the Pittura Metafisica, new ways of seeing objects and finding hidden meanings in them.

His paintings from that period express a singularity of daily objects we take as granted. He places these objects in doubt: combining different elements, put them into dialogue in a strange and new environment. De Chirico’s paintings are defined by light and shadow plays, absurd perspectives, striking colors, invisible brushstrokes and architectural elements. Another constant presence will be the elements of classical mythology, inheritance of his motherland Greece. The work of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche will also mark deeply his art.

De Chirico will be profoundly touched when he moves to Italy. First, in 1909, when he moved with his mother to Milan, after studying in Germany for a brief time. Once in Italy, he also visited Rome and Florence. Then, in 1911, when he spent time in Turin, after moving to Paris in that same year with his family.

According to the painter, his paintings between 1912 and 1915 are strongly marked by Italy. In these works, he will blend personal memory with classical mythology and philosophy.

In his “Piazze d’Italia”(Squares of Italy) series, he will mix reality and fiction by creating large constructions in immense plans, large and empty spaces and plains, green skies, caramel floors, grandiose architecture, contradictory lights and shadows, absurd perspectives and random vanishing points. The lack of action in the images, combined with the colors and the shadows, refers to a quiet, melancholy and timeless environment. Out of our reality, with hints of dreams. People and buildings from another era, maybe forgotten in the past — the novel “Il Deserto Dei Tartari” (1940), from Italian writer Dino Buzzati, captures that spirit very well, intended or not intended.

The Red Tower and its elements

In this context, Giorgio De Chirico painted “The Red Tower” in 1913 (oil on canvas, 75.5cm x 100.5cm). Today, the painting belongs to the collection of Peggy Guggenhein in Venice, Italy. It was the first painting he ever sold in life.

The picture brings a landscape imagined by De Chirico, but, at the same time, seems that it can be found in any trip to Italy or in any other Mediterranean city. Timeless space is marked by real elements. In the painting, we see a square covered in total shade, flanked by two tall buildings that bring long arches. Going forward, the shadow gives way to a large empty field under strong sun. In it, a huge monument: a statue of a man on a horse. Following the countryside, a small village under the foot of small hills. There, an immense red circular tower, as if it were a fortification or a castle. The vertiginous presence of the tower marks the whole landscape.

The picture mixes references that De Chirico harvested from his affective memory in Turin and Italy and also in Germany. First, the tower is a reference to the Mole Antonelliana, an architectonic landmark in Turin, built by the architect Alessandro Antonelli. The immense construction would appear in other pictures, like “The Nostalgia of the Infinite” (at the MoMA collection).

The immense statue of the man mounted on the horse is a reference to the statue of King Carlo Alberto di Savoia (made in 1861 by Carlo Marochetti). Again, a reference to Turin, but also to De Chirico’s favorite writer, Nietzsche. The philosopher lived in Turin, in a fertile period when he wrote “Ecce Homo”. During his stay in the city, Nietzsche used to see the statue everyday from his bedroom window and makes references about it in letters. The presence of the arches, always present in other paintings of the series “Piazze d’Italia”, is a reference to the arcades of Hofgarten in Munich, a German city where De Chirico studied art.

“The Red Tower” shows us, like Van Gogh, how an artist can represent a real space while, at the same time, creating it.

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