Time regained
One of the greatest freedoms provided by contemporary art is that of overturning space and regaining possession of time. Think of, for instance, Lucio Fontana. And his breaking through the canvas to deliver us the third dimension, that way blowing up any possible division between painting and plastic art. Or think of Giacomo Balla’s or Umberto Boccioni’s fulminating insights, when they decide to freeze movement and thus, paradoxically, opening it up and making it eternal.
That is precisely the starting point of Liliana Cecchin’s artistic research. Liliana Cecchin is a curious artist, eager for continuous experimentation and has chosen groups of stranger people as the subject of her art. She started painting in the middle of the New Figuration period. The prime source of inspiration was the metropolis. One was inclined to believe to be assisting to a “new Montmartre” with artists that would fall for young folks holding drinks in their hands in their nights out, and streets flooded with cars at rush hour. Artist−reporters were once again plundering everyday life with the rapacity that had characterized Manet and Renoir, greedy for shoes reflected in puddles and exchange of glances.
Back then, Liliana Cecchin was not really interested in the exchange of glances: she had already spotted her subject in that forced and inevitable contact that the metropolis imposes on people, which, instead, makes people impenetrable to human contact and glances. Her target was from the start — as it is now — the crowd. She liked to wander along the covered walkways in Turin or Bologna, as well as observing the crowds in the subway stations, be it in Milan or Paris. She would let herself get enchanted by the marble and neon lights of airports and seize, in those anonymous places identical to themselves in every corner of the planet, the interactions between people. In her works at the time, the brushstrokes did not leave any space to facial features leading to an overall impression of emotional silence. In these airy paintings, featuring a close-up of large portions of the floor — indeed, embodying emptiness — people were moving around without looking at each other and were meeting without seeing each other. Sometimes on the canvas, only legs or feet were left — faceless and nameless bodies. None of the characters of the paintings would have remembered the woman or the man they were sitting next to or that they had bumped into and maybe even apologized to. Even the girl -holding a child by her hand so tight to make sure not to lose each other – she was already looking elsewhere, somehow lost in an “afterward” precluded to the viewer.
We are dealing here with a series of extremely bright works, played on an often reduced range of colors which is then suddenly lit by a flash of bright red or green, all admirably built in a formal balance. The viewers immediately feel like thrown into the partial views composed of complex architectures and collapsing perspectives; they get absorbed into a flow of movement whose dynamics they know very well and to which they belong on a daily routine.
And then, eventually, those partial views began to acquire a vibration under the skin that went on growing up until today. At one point, Liliana Cecchin has decided to shift her focus from the lack of communication and the anonymity towards a dynamic analysis. Before her eyes, not only indifferent identities were blindly coming across each other, but there was also a passing of time entirely unknown to consciousness. What suddenly jumped to the eye was that those moments of life were, in a way, not being lived for real, people were somehow piling them up in the oblivion of automatic gesture, while their mind was either focusing on what was going on before or what would be happening afterward, discarding the idea of fully living the present moment. There, that present moment is where the heart was: the present of a movement so automatic to go unnoticed. And that is precisely what the artist decided to fix on canvas.
Therefore, suddenly, the crowd becomes alive with a dynamism not only given by the posture, but rendered in the detail of a leg that gets up, changes position: at the same time one perceives it as folded for the next step and relaxed after the movement.
Building on the lessons of Balla — a key work as Girl Running on a Balcony — and even more on Unique Forms of Continuity in Space by Boccioni, Liliana Cecchin animates her paintings and crystallizes for us that time unconsciously lost that we never lived for real.
The painting becomes a dance of sinuous waves and spirals, a fluid choreography where clothes become fascinating Baroque draperies and where the light source livens up into spiral patterns.
In 1912, while Boccioni develops the idea that he will then materialize in a symbolic work of futurism — Unique Forms of Continuity in Space — Marcel Duchamp painted Nude Descending a Staircase, an incredible game of moving solids that perfectly blends Picasso’s Cubism with the dynamic movement of Futurism. The roots of Liliana Cecchin’s work must be traced back in Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, only revisited in a contemporary perspective. Her works are graciously clothed in dancing shapes, and above all, they are enriched with a full range of symbols coming from the rushing life of our contemporary era.
The path that seems to lead her towards the abstract reaches a new stage in her very last works. In these works the artist’s brush seems to be dancing itself in the swirls of paint on the canvas. Shreds of representation cling to the mere presence of the feet: rows of bodyless limbs move around in what seems a syncopated dance on a giant yellow floor that captures all the viewers’ attention. Even the movement that dominates the top of the picture is no longer ascribable to an animated creature. Instead, it is pure dynamism, overlapping lines, and we can make sense of it only because of the vague silhouette of a dark female leg on the left of the pictorial space. Perhaps the highest point of this production is represented by the paintings in which the artist has attained the perfect balance between abstraction and representation, between movement and immobility.
This perfect balance can be seen in The red ghost, for example, where the figure of the boy in profile takes on the epic power of the solitary hero thanks to the waves of matter in motion that appear to arise from him, from his shoulders, just like a magic cloak. Built on a series of diagonal architectures, the painting has a portion of stillness on top — in the foreground right below the male figure — but at the same time from there begins a single telluric movement having its epicenter in the black spot in the exact center of the canvas. The light here is dazzling, bright colors such as those used by Manet are combined with an overall pattern that seems to hypnotize the viewer. The ghost is amazingly built, resulting in a complex tangle of figures played around a theme dear to the artist, the stairs — and escalators — that communicate new directions to the movement of the scene. The figures are caught in the race that takes (as taught by Giacometti) the shape of extended legs, of arms raised in a gesture which- because of the movement- turns hands into claws. Faces suddenly reappear– after many years of absence from the artist’s works – but they are deformed, ghostly, sometimes relocated right at the middle of the human figure because of the effect of the movement of the escalator. Here, Gerhard Richter’s vibrating brush does not lose power but puts on a feminine grace along with contemporary attention to detail. Meanwhile the conceptual content of a hard work, thoroughly meditated, deeply rooted in the feverish pace of our daily lives lightens up in the freshness of the brushstroke and in the shining chromatic delight.
