Author: Pier Paolo Pasolini
Translators: Alessandro Giammei & Ara H. Merjian
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I Started Painting Again Yesterday
From Issue 11, an essay from Heretical Aesthetics by Pier Paolo Pasolini, translated from Italian by Alessandro Giammei and Ara H. Merjian.
Yesterday, 19 March, I started painting again for the first time in three decades (a few exceptions notwithstanding.) I couldn’t manage to do anything in pencil, or pastel, or ink. So, I took a bottle of glue and poured it directly on the paper, drawing and painting at the same time. There’s probably a reason why I never decided to attend an art school or some academy. The mere thought of creating something traditional makes me nauseous—it literally makes me sick. Even thirty years ago, I made things difficult for myself. I made most of my drawings at the time with the tip of my finger, squeezing right from the tube onto cellophane. Or else I drew with the tube itself. As far as actual paintings, I did them on burlap—the more coarse and full of holes the better—primed in the clumsiest way with glue and gesso. Even still, I couldn’t (or can’t) claim to be an informalist painter. I’m more interested in the “composition,” in its contours, than in materials. And yet I manage to make the forms I want, with the contours I want, only if the material is resistant, impossible, and especially if it is a “precious” one. The painters who influenced me in 1943 when I made my first paintings and drawings were Masaccio and [Carlo] Carrà—neither of whom, indeed, paid inordinate attention to materials as opposed to form. My interest in painting suddenly ceased about ten or twelve years ago, during the time of abstract painting’s ascendency, and then that of Pop. The interest is stirring again. Just as they were in 1943, my painting’s subjects can be nothing other than everyday, tender, and perhaps idyllic things. Despite [Roberto] Longhi’s cosmopolitan influence—a divine authority which I adored so much at the time I did not even pray to it—my painting is dialectal: dialect as a poetic language. Exquisite, mysterious—the stuff of altarpieces. I still feel the religion of things when I paint. It’s as if time hasn’t passed, like a thirty-year parenthesis; I suddenly find myself again in front of a canvas, at the very moment I gave up painting. Among my aforementioned idols I forgot to mention Morandi, and I can’t hide my immense love for Bonnard (his afternoons soaked in silence and Mediterranean sun.) I would love to be able to make a canvas similar to one of his Provençal landscapes which I saw in a small museum in Prague. At worst I would like to have been a minor neo-Cubist painter. But I could never, ever bring myself to use chiaroscuro, or to blow color with the spongy purity and perfect cleanliness proper to Cubism. I need expressionistic materials, with no alternative. (As you can see, even dilettantes have their manias.)¹
¹ Though written in 1970, this short text was first published only posthumously in 1992, in the magazine L’Espresso (1955–), to which Pasolini had contributed. He presents his reprise of artmaking as something coming out of the blue. Over the previous decades, however, he had experimented on several occasions with painting, drawing, and even collage, albeit fitfully. The previous year, for instance, he had improvised a number of portraits of the opera diva and actress Maria Callas as they both sat on a beach in Tragonisi, following their collaboration on his film Medea (1969). Made from flower pigments, wine, and coffee on paper, these works differ from some of the works he composed subsequently, some of which resemble informalist painting (in spite of their figurative titles, such as Sandbanks beneath a Grey Sky, c. 1970.) His mixed-media portrait of the poet Andrea Zanzotto from 1974 subordinates the sitter’s facial profile to a splatter of earthy pigments—the kind of improvised experiment with materials which he describes here. Whatever the oblique resonances of his works with contemporary trends, or his reverence for aspects of ‘cosmopolitan’ modernism, Pasolini insists once again upon the ‘dialectal’ pith of his imagery: a crypto-religious reverence for the quotidian as refracted through a poetics of the local and of the material.
PIER PAOLO PASOLINI (1922–19775) was an Italian film director, poet, writer and one of the most controversial and provocative intellectuals of his time. Mostly known for his first and last films, Accattone and Salò, as well as The Gospel According to St. Matthew and Decameron, he was also a prolific essayist and activist. He was murdered in 1975.
ALESSANDRO GIAMMEI is Assistant Professor of Italian Studies at Yale University. He wrote about masculinity, nonsense verse, and the revivals of the Renaissance in later modernities. His latest books, Ariosto in the Machine Age (University of Toronto Press) and Il Rinascimento è uno Zombie (Einaudi) are forthcoming in 2024.
ARA H. MERJIAN is Professor of Italian Studies at New York University, where he is an affiliate of the Institute of Fine Arts. Among other books, he is the author of Against the Avant-Garde: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Contemporary Art and Neocapitalism (University of Chicago Press, 2020) and co-editor of Heretical Aesthetics: Pasolini on Painting (Verso, 2023). He has taught at Harvard, Stanford, and the San Quentin State Penitentiary College Education Program.
From Heretical Aesthetics by Pier Paolo Pasolini, prefaced by T.J. Clark, edited by
Alessandro Giammei and Ara H. Merjian. Excerpted with permission of the publisher, Verso Books.
This essay appeared in Issue 11 of Circumference.
Issue 11 • Summer 2023 © 2023 CIRCUMFERENCE, Inc.
