Leonardo Beccegato for the Jubilee
by Renato
Polacco
At the end of the second millennium Leonardo
Beccegato’s artistic production, consisting of a substantial number of
paintings inspired by various casual circumstances and therefore by various
thematic proponents, seems to have reversed the route taken by painters at the
end of the nineteenth century and throughout the entire twentieth century.
The final works of impressionism, in which all possible
resources of light and color combined with disparate techniques were
experimented with by the artists, witness a progressive disintegration of the
image intended as the “mimesis” of nature and its distortion, finally leading
to its complete disappearance depending on the artist’s state of mind and is
interpretation of intellectual categorizations. The total elimination of all
possible spatial-temporal connotations referring to reflections, sensations and
feelings suggested by the color combinations, signs and other elements
characterizing the artists’ work can also be seen.
Chromatic-symbolic abstraction has therefore been
predominant in the linguistics of most artistic production in the last century,
characterized by a general existential crisis. The new millennium seems to be
showing some symptoms of recovery by means of a reacquired faith in human
resources, nourished by an uninterrupted succession of proposed solutions to
the most burning issues of science and thought, particularly in the last
decade.
People still write that Beccegato’s sculpturally
constructed images dissolve into vaporous shadows created by the light.
However, I see them as the artist himself sees them. I think I know him well
enough to say that it would perhaps be more coherent to write and affirm that
the dark atmosphere illuminated by smoky rays seems to emanate from a fiery
chaos. The final effects of a no longer very mysterious explosion from which
the solar system was created – and with it the world we live in – seems to take
shape, combine and condense their various components: these are the primordial
images which characterize his paintings.
Beccegato is an scientist as well as a painter, a man
of science who, perhaps more than other artists, feels an unconscious need to
express problems related to the origins of the cosmos and life itself. In the
various Concerti music harmonizes the
deafening and incoherent sounds of a universe in which the echoes of the
distant explosion of its origins are still resonant; in Filosofi there is a search for a logical explanation regarding the
mystery of both nature’s and man’s genesis, their destiny and their function;
we see Astronomi, Astronomia and Osservazione del cielo, the beauthy alluded
to In ragazza allo specchio, with Vanità, Tentazione and other paintings
taking up this theme. Thus we have a succession of observation regarding the
study of mankind and the universe, reflections on human nature and on woman,
with her weaknesses and strengths, as seen in Susanna e i Vecchioni.
Continuous evocations of distant grandeur emerge from the
mysterious subconscious of the artist. These takes form more organically in a
contextual process leading to the artist’s realization of various situations
and precise moments which, even though coming from unfathomable distances,
refer to emotions, feeling and worries troubling Beccegato’s subconscious.
I talked about the unfathomable distances, of those
nocturnal or pre-dawn skies still illuminated by fiery rays of “the day after
the big bang” whose din and flashes are still alive in Beccegato’s
subconscious. They are alive in the subconscious of everyone in the feeling of
pain which accompanies our everyday lives, the legacy of an elusive intensity
of suffering which brought the stars and life into being.
This is how the primordial atmospheric dimension
constantly present in Beccegato’s work should be inferred, even where the
varied color ranges are diversified. The forms of a humanity still motionless
and bewildered by the enormity of the event which created it seem to coagulate
from his fluid elements of fiery vapor. In the course of production the artist evolves
by means of science, music, beauty and virtue which, in order to better emerge,
require temptations.
But science and civilization are not enough to bring
order nor nourish man’s faith nor even to appease that feeling of pain linked
to the genesis of man’s life in the broadest sense: then only possibility of
redemption from this suffering, omnipresent in humanity, comes from Christ’s
message, of his appearance on earth or rather in the presage of his coming: it is here that the primordial
images, painted as fiery lights, acquire a harmonious geometry of Piero della
Francesca proportions, or rather Laurana’s in the Annunciazione. In it the Virgin is surrounded by a suffused light
which offers, through the purity of the forms it evidences, a sense of hope in
the rearrangement and harmonization of the aggregations still imperfect since
the moment of the creation and in the incalculable millions of years following
it.
Here is Natività,
Pietà, Deposizione and Sacre conversazioni
in which Beccegato directly participates, placing himself among the characters
present in these religious paintings. In Natività
Beccegato’s face brightens and nature brightens, appearing to take on some
sixteenth century Venetian connotations: kneeling before the Virgin and Child,
alongside Saint Leonard, Beccegato appears immersed in prayer; the landscape in
the background is Saint Mark’s Basin and the island of San Giorgio, whose
dramatic luminosity contrast with the serenity of the Virgin’s image in the
fore ground of the painting.
Thus the Christian message of Beccegato’s paintings is
decisive in its substantial re-absorption of the drama and pain instilled in
the human soul, and perhaps the profound sensitivity of the artist, in the
faith and prayer in which he appears immersed in Sacre conversazioni and before the Virgin with Child and
His language is certainly not immediate, violent and
alive with unpredictable lights like Gustav Moreau’s, nor like that the
expressionists or of Odilon Redon arguing with them. He contrasts “felt
reality”, which they saw as an artistic necessity, with “seen reality”. It is
the language of a master who closes with the rich and multi faceted experimentation
carried out in the twentieth century, with pure color exploited in its most
intimate and elusive physical to psychological resources. It is intuitable in
the effects it has on the human soul and the inexhaustible range of feelings
expressed by the artist in the rich variety and combinations of pure colors. It
is language of someone who has found faith in rearranging and re-combining
sculpturally constructed images and grandiose figures, which more than a
century of thinkers, artists and humanity in general has brought to a stage of
dislocation and disintegration.
They are monumental and statuesque characters who in
their greatness express the immensity of life’s pain and at the same time
express man’s great dignity in confronting it and exalting it through faith. In
his later paintings the light coming from still smoking vapors, a distant
reminder of the even more distant creation, although dramatic, is softened by
layers of rays which lightly and delicately touch man and woman suggesting a
sense of serenity which has not entirely been reached. It is a light which can
be read as an invitation to humanity to confront the new millennia with renewed
certainty