The “Regoli” Affair - di Enrico Crispolti

Luciano Regoli has a strong conviction: when painting is perceived as a means of expression/communication, it is of uttermost importance to preserve (as an effective transmission of knowledge) its entire specific traditional beauty. A heritage that under many aspects is in danger of being lost; needless to say, a heritage not made of aesthetic ideology but rather of practical experience; the ability of making painting a means to express much more and in more flexible ways (and with an implicit dialogue with other visual means of communication available nowadays). In its search for new values to replace the old ones, the many-sided (fortuitously) historical event of contemporary art tried to strip itself of that totality (at times even virtousistic) of knowledge which was the core of a painter’s traditional completeness, be he Manet or Mancini. This made personal decisive transgressions possible. Contemporary art tried to place its transgressions (in the most disparate ways: from Kokoschka to Permeke, from Matisse to Picasso, from Balla to Mondrian, from De Chirico to Ernst, from Klee to Fontana, if we may) not within but against said heritage. It made it essential, it stripped it. In its most memorable solutions and creative paths, that essentiality, that concision, correspond to the establishment of new values. The values of our time, in which we strongly identify ourselves for different reasons and under different aspects. But in the spreading of a standard painting practice that emerges (rarely at first hand) from those foundations, lately there has been a truly impoverished usage of painting, which is unaware of its historical heritage (not the skills) as a means of descriptive visual communication. A return was manifested during the last decades mostly under the pretext of restoration. From the “trans-avant-gardists” to the “anachronists”, this pragmatic return to painting (favored also by a market need following the object void caused by “conceptual art”) was perceived as the return to a language of which we only had a rough idea (when we had one at all). It was not, as many claimed, a “new quality” of painting but rather propositions unaware of any kind of notion of what was or could be the “quality” of painting. It is sufficient to compare some renowned painters of our days (Anselm Kiefer, for example) to perceive a painting “unculture” that only market trusts and rumors of critics of fortune could have placed on the front page. In all this confusion Regoli, isolated, believes in two things: the painting as a tool in its traditional integrity, and the need to protect the heritage of handed down skills and expertise, thus of a specific “knowledge”; and the relationship, as it was called in the past, with the “real”.

His confidence may be mistaken as a challenge, and a challenge it is. He is so sure that if it has to be painting, it should be painting all the way, in all its possible qualities and representative connotations: portraits, landscapes, still life. It is a challenge to the critics obliged once again to interpret a painting genre exhibiting ancient qualities. And of course, it is also a challenge to himself, to the possibility of affirming his work against the odds of today’s simplified genre. In the meanwhile, as I do not wish (and I have never surrendered, not even during those years that witnessed the shift of artistic communication towards new social possibilities prior to the grand restoration that surely caused today’s ideal void), I do not wish, I repeat, to deprive myself of appreciating painting, of the pleasure of appreciating painting also within the context of its heritage and traditional beauty; and here I am ready to face the Regoli “affair”. A man who is searching for his “painting opportunity” in portraiture with portraits often placed in a setting (he is one of the most talented and skilled portraitists around, like Schwitters was in the dark mature English period), in still life, also placed in a setting with the addition of many object, and in landscapes (of Rome, of the countryside and of the island of Elba, where he lives). In other words, he is interested in painting as such, in the pictorial transcription, intimately lyrical, tonal, and the emotional relationship with what is “real”; a perception he wishes to narrate with painting, pure painting. He has a non-timbric stress on tonality, obviously relying on the light rendered by cautious and subtle shifts to neutrals. This stress on tonality contributes to a substantially contemplated layout and due to its “ad diem” aggressive historical authenticity, it is extrapolated from time and placed in the still time of pure dialogue lyricism, which is essentially contemplative. Only this guarantees Regoli the execution of a complete painting, which in fact is his primary objective. The cultural ties on which his faith in painting is linguistically based upon is distant: Morelli and the early works of Mancini, in particular, with a few hints of Sargent and perhaps Bartoli (not Freud’s shocking harshness). Neo-humanistic in its own way, his painting’s most up-to-date trait relies on the certainty of the represented thing, calm and total..