/ PRESENTATION
EN PLEIN AIR
Canemorto
by Antonio Grulli
It is essential to always bear in mind that the foundation of art - understood today as it has been since the Middle Ages - lies on a path of excess, trespassing, building of a route capable of going beyond, exiting an orbit that seemed determined and definitive.
Being true artists means being capable of taking at least one element that had no citizenship in the art world, that lived outside the artistic borders, and, with one’s own strength and ability, succeeding in proving that it has every right to exist as an object, feeling, form, style in that very same art world that was up until then forbidden. “Out” is the art centre. And all this process has manifested itself both as content of the body of work and as position of the artist, intellectual and at the same time physical and corporeal.
In this perspective, two crucial moment in art history ought to be kept in mind: 1841 and 1949. Because sometimes, to desire something is not enough, but material and technological circumstances are required for it to come to fruition. And these circumstances often trigger a reaction, the emergence of energies and frictions already present that are finally released, made manifest.
In 1841, the American portraitist John Rand invents the first tin collapsible paint tubes to replace the old and inconvenient containers used to store oil paint. Pierre-Auguste Renoir, on this regard, will have this to say, ‘Without colours in tubes, there would be no Cézanne, no Monet, no Pissarro, and no Impressionism’. And it is true: paint tubes enable painters to paint for hours on end with ease and comfort outside their studios. En plein air painting is born. But this revolution ought to be understood beyond its artistic and linguistic impact. What happens strengthens some core characteristics of being an artist of the world.
It is often assumed that a hiatus between art and people took place from the historical avant-garde period onwards, but that is not the case. True art, new art, is a terroristic act because it shows people that the spirit of the time has completely changed. It upsets our beliefs, and there is nothing pleasant or accommodating about it. True art is uncomfortable, it disturbs, it takes hold and destroys us. Giotto brought forth a tremendous revolution, greater than Duchamp’s, and was only loved by an intellectual elite. Common people didn’t understand him: they wanted gold and gothic lace; farmers’ faces and tridimensional bodily presence was blasphemy at a time of God and Saints.
The birth of en plein air painting causes a furious reaction from the masses who vehemently oppose this new kind of painting.
There’s an abundance of anecdotes on the reaction to the first exhibitions in France, as well as to painters of the likes of William Turner, who is constantly mocked by the press. I’m sure it is not just a lack of understanding of a new kind of painting; I believe that this figures, these artists, traveling the world, freed from their studios, so independent and abnormal, so extra, and, in their being different, so antisocial, they are even more terrifying than their paintings. Vincent Van Gogh is killed for this; and if we don’t want to believe this version of the story, we can’t deny that it is ‘suicide by society’. Something very similar happens to Renoir, and he just barely saves himself. For the masses, the artist has to stay put, in his studio, indoor, confined by the world. He must not get out. But the artist does.
Art overflows. And the studio turns into the street. Because art requires life to be born, and life needs art to be eternal.
In 1949, Edward Seymour introduces spray paint for the first time.
Artists have a new tool, an even faster one, an even more conveniente one, one that suggests original stylistic and formal solutions.
This simple innovation, the introduction of colour in a pre-existing tool produces an earthquake still underway today.
The friction between artist and collectivity intensifies even more, and so begins the copious deaths, arrests, fines, investigations.
The multi-faceted connection between painting and street art might seem foreign to many. As an art critic, I’m intrigued by the fact that there seems to be real continuity and transfer of heritage. Over the last decades, ‘mainstream’ contemporary art (let’s call it that for the sake of convenience) has tried, without fully succeed, to rid itself of a series of its own characteristics: in art, it has become inelegant to discuss stylistic recognisability for the work of the artist, in the same way as we seem to have moved past the concept that someone can be capable of formal innovation for the first time; any form of value assessment of the artist is absolutely prohibited as they all seem to live in a sort of shapeless limbo within which they are all the same greatness, or smallness, and from which they appear to emerge based on unknown criteria. Street art has collected from the garbage all these principles and has made them its own: stylistic recognisability is fundamental on the street, and it is the artist’s pride; every writer is well aware of who and when a certain letter was created, in a specific way that had not been seen before. And there’s an ongoing fight to establish who is the greatest street artist, a place where all don’t have the same value. Street art lives, healthy, and thrives against the attempts to repress it: it doesn’t need schools, it doesn’t ask for financing, it doesn’t want propaganda.
And here comes CANEMORTO’s exhibition. The entire project is a gigantic and poetic tribute to en plein air painting; ancestors like Renoir, Monet, Cézanne, Van Gogh, who first put colour in their rucksacks and hats on their head and went out to make trouble; to those who first put themselves at risk to provide evidence of the importance of art, and of how there is no art without life and life without art.
It is a poetic tribute in classic CANEMORTO’s style, the hooligan joke becomes affinity and trick to embrace that which seems distant and different.
The cornerstone of the entire exhibition is the video documenting their participation to an extemporaneous en plein air painting contest that took place in previous months. A contest CANEMORTO not only took part in, but one they won (it’s all true, I swear) even though they did everything they could to lose. From this moment, a sequence of absolutely crazy events unfolds, always between cockiness and misery, piss-taking and generosity, folly and intellectual honesty; all elements true to their art, especially the many videos realised both as artwork and mean of communication with their audience.
A series of paintings in which they confront themselves with en plein air and landscape painting adds to the exhibition.
And here the most astonishing elements emerge. Because CANEMORTO have a soul deeply embedded with historical art experiences, above all others with early nineteenth century avant-garde, towards which they appear bound to by love and gratitude. In these paintings, I felt the taste of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s jugged and sharp line, his Swiss exile alpine landscapes reflecting the darkness of times mankind is sometimes called to live in; I found the black skies of Diego Rivera’s murals at the Ministry of Public Education in Mexico City, under which a revolution was attempted; I discovered Paul Gauguin’s shapes, hidden in a landscape too imbued with melancholy to be recognised as earthly paradise; I sensed Fauves’ passion to turn emotions into landscapes.
These are profoundly classical paintings, even though current, where three can paint and still make magic happen, something generally seen as blasphemy in the art world. But this is what true artists probably have to do: blaspheme in the church of art most sacred rules. Their collaboration then moves between the Cadavre Exquis practice and music collective evolution today.
With the greatness that only belongs to poets, Vladimir Majakovskij, another giant suicided by society, once wrote, ‘don’t shut, Party, alone in your rooms, remain friends with the street kids’. The poet speaks of the whole when it talks about the specific. The street kid was the hooligan, the irregular of those years, words also used to identify him as he identified himself in them: it is precisely what street artists are today. The party that locks itself in its rooms is not just the political party, it is also art that is institutionalised, that becomes academia, that detaches itself from life, that removes itself from the real world, that turns to rhetoric in order to survive when it deserves to die.
Baise Pascal told us how all mankind’s issues stem from the inability to remain calm in a room. But we know that as modern men we were not made to live as brutes. Let’s pray then for a future in which artists find the tools and the way to get out into the world and make noise, shine, shake consciences, make this place that’s been given to us even more terribly beautiful.