| Davide Orler:
the tormented yet inspiring journey of a soul |
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The artistic production of a painter has always been the expression, and almost reflection of his mind, resounding more or less hidden echoes of the great events that have marked the life of the artist himself. This, as is widely known, is above all true of the twentieth century when the spread of photography and, contextually, of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic research substantially decreed the end of painting as a mere depiction of reality, opening the new and exciting way for an art that portrays the sensitiveness of the human mind, the artist’s feelings and most intimate emotions, and not only through the more or less ‘classic’, lyrical or gesturally informal, ‘fauve’ abstraction. Thus the entire work of Davide Orler, stretching back over half a century of tireless and chaotically overwhelming activity, is almost the most paradigmatic example of how art can and must be the authentic - and almost poetically psychological - expression of a soul, becoming (when it is true art) the intuition of a universal message, a forerunner, free from fashions or currents. The some five thousand works he has so far created are the unequivocal demonstration of this. The oneiric, ‘prophetic’ and vigorous gestural expressiveness of his latest work can only be fully understood by looking at the previous stages (at times difficult, painful and apparently gloomy) of his human and professional development, deliberately and in part unconsciously reflected in his paintings and boards, where the ‘conceptual’ nature of the tinged message becomes sublime disenchanted lyric poetry of human fragility, hidden in the mystery of the Divine, as his almost breathless desire to recount his story seems to wish to emphasise. In Orler’s later work, by means of a concrete “mountain” stubbornness, the message of that new sacred figurative art takes root, so exquisitely and genuinely new, fresh and crystal clear, so openly and programmatically non abstract and yet, in the end, so intimately ‘informal’, if by informal we mean a split, in the message infused by the artist, from the objective meaning of the depiction itself, to access deeper existential and faith-based intuitions. Orler’s human vicissitudes, more than those of other artists, are the essential key to interpreting and fully understanding his works, his message, his artistic strength. Davide Orler’s first encounter with painting can be said to have taken place through his friend and ‘maestro’ Riccardo Schweizer (1925-2004), just six years older than he and who at the time, not without fortune, had managed to leave his hometown and enrol in the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice. As Orler himself recalls, he had the opportunity to meet regularly with Schweizer immediately after the war and with him “a small group of culture and art lovers, a little artistic coterie of intellectuals, curious and anxious to explore the new turmoil that was spreading across Europe”; among them were Hungarian writer and poet Zoltan Rákosi and artist Bruno Saetti (1902-1984), the unforgettable rediscoverer (or rather interpreter) of the ancient and state-of-the-art fresco technique. In actual fact, however, we can go a little further back in time to when Davide, at the age of twelve or thirteen, was literally struck by the magic of the shapes and colours of his hometown, Mezzano, one of the ancient dwelling spots in Trentino’s Primiero Valley, a town characterised by typically rural, mountain architecture, built from wood and stone (like his parents’ home built in 1807). Here, outside walls were often decorated with simple, folk murals, partly originating from the artistic tradition developed in nearby Feltre, historically a frontier town and dividing point between the Serenissima’s central-eastern Veneto plain and the Alpine area of Austro-Hungarian Trentino (the ‘Contado del Tirolo’ as can still be read on ancient maps). And it was precisely the culture and art forms of the Primiero Valley, forever suspended between Germany and Venice, that indelibly influenced Orler’s work, constituting its natural backdrop. Despite infinite hardships linked to the tough existence in a mountain town recovering from the war, where life still revolved around the ancient rhythms of haymaking, mountain pastures and transhumance, Orler began painting ingenuous yet fresh and immediate depictions of the Madonna on the walls of his house in the popular style. At fourteen, he painted a Crucifixion on a towel stolen from his mother and a fresco on the walls of the mill his father worked in (a “vocation”, however, that developed within the family: his uncle, Giovanni, at the start of the century, had been a renowned church fresco painter before emigrating to North America, taking the tradition of his lands with him). In 1942 (when our army was engaged in what was to become the disastrous Russian escapade) he painted an unadulterated depiction of Alpine Skiers (fig.1) which, though still immature in style, reveals, at the tender age of eleven, Davide’s remarkable drawing ability, with unquestionable assonances with the great engravers of the period, such as Marcello Dudovich or Walter Molino. In 1946, at the age of fifteen, Orler went for the first time to Venice, the city of his dreams and deepest aspirations as he himself recalls, still trembling with excitement: “I was only fifteen when I ran away from my home and town […] to see the city of my dreams, the city built on water that I had heard so much about from friends and acquaintances, from poets and artists, in love - as I must have been - with the art and culture that Venice emanated. When I think back to those days I still get emotional. It was the winter of 1946 when, with just a few coins in my pocket and no friends to rely on, l left my town for Venice.” It is a 1947 oil painting depicting Saint Peter (fig. 2) that, beyond the stereotyped representation of symbols connoting the saint, reveals a certain ingenuous immediacy so typical of Orler’s work at that time. Full of enthusiasm, he later (at the age of eighteen) enrolled in the Academy of Fine Arts but was soon to drop out to volunteer for the Navy, in youthful search of an adventurous life full of intense experiences. Thus he patrolled up and down the Mediterranean on minesweepers and corvettes, visiting ports and meeting various peoples and cultures and, as he recalls, “above all the south, full of colours and that intense light, so different from Venice and the mountains in Trentino” (see also table 2). While posted at the Messina base, he opened a small studio in Contesse, a secret hideout where he could take refuge during breaks from military activities: “It was then that I felt the irrepressible desire to paint. To paint following my instinct, my passion, with no teachers or academies. I threw what I saw and felt onto canvas, without thought, accepting no compromises, alternating between work on board and work with my brushes.” In 1953 his paintings included a Self-portrait (fig.3) in which he is dressed in his sailor’s uniform with a thick, fair beard: a portrayal that still showed traces of the European and distinctly French fin de siècle pictorial climate. Again as he himself likes to point out, “the warmth of that land, the faces of the people”, ordinary people, epically lined by sorrow, fatigue and the sun, overbearingly permeated his works of the period. However, in those passionate ‘fauve’ years, more careful observation reveals twenty-year-old Davide’s internal fragility: cast from a small mountain town into the vastness of countries on the Mediterranean, his strong sensibility was put harshly to the test, particularly by the great tragedy of the natural disasters he was caught up in as a rescuer along with his fellow soldiers. These dramatic experiences were to be reflected in the vivid colours and deformed spectral figures of an expressionist tone (an almost interior Munch-like Scream) of those shapeless, fractured and decomposed bodies of the drowned he recovered with the Navy in Salerno (Recovery of Salerno’s Flood Victims, 1955: table 5; cp. also table 6), or in the ‘haunted’ works dedicated to the Salina Earthquake, or again in the tangled mess of flesh and steel depicting a crash between two lorries (Sicilian Crash, again 1955). In it, Pasquali almost went as far as seeing the unconscious realisation of a pure Orler-style Art Brut, i.e. of that art thus defined by Jean Dubuffet in 1945, the art of the outsiders, those outside the art system’s institutions and cultural mould. Indeed, the work of this young Orler is spontaneous and sincere, immune from any form of one-way conditioning, based on individual creative impulses, at times irregularly compulsive, at times naively ‘primitive’. In a pantheistic vision of the Divine coinciding with nature, his art, painted in his small Sicilian refuge, is also overbearingly traversed by the hail of those tragedies, rendered using strong colours and with a ‘schizophrenic’ decomposition of figures of cubist and Picasso descent (the great master of the twentieth century he unconditionally admired), filtered across a Nordic, expressionist interpretation drawn in part from Schweizer, or rather, sincerely shared with him. Precisely those landscapes created while on leave in 1955, employing fragments of gluedon wood, are a tribute to his pantheism, where once again Nature gives Art its woods, scorched by the sun, worn and tormented by time. In 1955/56 Orler, at that time in La Spezia, began to go through a profound crisis, in some ways comparable to that of Georges Rouault (1871-1958), that reached its peak in 1958: his ongoing involvement in great sea tragedies provoked existential suffering that generated a bitter sense of powerless solitude, the sign or tip of an iceberg of depression that even led him to the brink of suicide. The pleurisy he contracted while on military duty, resulting in him being sent to hospital, led him to embrace the collage technique (elite form of Cubism), having no paints at his disposal. Two paradigmatic works of the period are Harem and Sailors’ Women, works steeped in distressing solitude and disconsolate realism: an entire world of emblematic, ambiguous figures, at times portrayed with ruthless violence, that populates his paintings and collages of the period, elaborating a language that adheres to his most intimate needs for expressive drama. The heartless, mercenary love shown in those works symbolises his attempt to escape the anguish of oppressive reality, but like a drug that creates artificial paradises, it proved to be an existential trap, bewitching but empty. An example of this is Woman on Balcony, from 1956, in the form of an enigmatic, fatal, sphinx-like temptress, or various collages from the same year, the subject of which is the mysterious, deformed and “deforming” image of a woman, sensual in characteristics but no longer in form, that become almost symbols of a crude and unaesthetic kamasutra (see, to name but a few, Woman on Armchair - table 15; Woman with Dog; Girl in Garden; Woman in the Mirror; Woman in the Sun; Interior with Woman Lying Down; Woman on Balcony - table 16; cp. also table 14). Though similar to the experiences of German Expressionism and in particular to a certain climate dear to George Grosz (in which the woman, as Paolo Levi rightly pointed out, “is aggressive, arid land, of sex driven to the absurd”), as in Rouault’s work elements of social accusation or political intents of strong moral tension do not appear, but rather tones of a deep, entirely psychological, interior struggle. As another escape from those tragedies on the sea, tinged in his works with vivid, passionate, almost fauve tones, during his leave spent in the libraries of Naples and Messina or following art exhibitions he had already felt a symbolic, utopian impulse towards ethereal, primeval, ‘ingenuous’ islands, serene and alien to his life at that time, that were later to be seen in the sweet chorography of the soft, winding hills around La Spezia (see, for example, his oil on board from 1953, of almost naïve structure, where the blue of the sea clashes with the whiteness of distant peaks, and the hills in the foreground, with their brown tones and marked by trees on soft ridges, to a certain extent recall the primitivism of the hills idealised by Zoran Music: fig. 4; cp. also table 8). The only other break from those distressing “nightmares” is, perhaps, a large painting depicting Mezzano and the crystalline Nocturnal Scenes in Mezzano from 1958 (table 18) - later taken up in the enchanted nocturnal scenes On Lake Garda from 1961 - almost a “childlike” rest in the calm, safe and comforting womb of Mother Nature, snow-covered and touched by the discreet light of a turgid, Botero-style moon, starry nocturnal scenes of enchanted wonder, they too representing a sort of escape from his daily inner conflict. The large painting mentioned above (3x7.4m), on the other hand, depicts a nostalgic summer view of the town of Mezzano, with the “Pale di San Martino” (steep mountains of San Martino) in the background and several locals who Orler had met as a boy. The artist began the painting in 1956 while serving on board his military ship. He used hammock fabrics, made from hemp, sowing them together as the work progressed. The painting was only completed in 1958 and displayed in Antibes.
However, every time he had been sent as a rescuer to deal
with natural disasters and floods, they had overbearingly and
violently thrown him back into the vortex of his existential tempests.
Hence War, 1954 (table 2), already at that time significantly
clashed with his attempt to “escape” represented by his
Picasso-style Ballerina (table 4) or the ambiguous and sensual
Sailors’Women mentioned earlier. The French exhibition, in particular, gave Orler the opportunity to open up his art to the international scene and meet some of the more prominent figures on the cultural scene of the period, such as the “mythical figure” of Pablo Picasso (whom, among Italian artists, he prematurely resembled, “servile” manners aside), sculptress Germaine Richier (1904-1959), and writers and poets Jean Cocteau (1889-1963, who illustrated his own works and was a painter) and Jacques Prévert (1900-1977). Moreover, in Venice he had had the chance to join that astonishing elite group of emerging young artists, in which the new neorealist, neoexpressionist, abstractionist and informal poetics and philosophies met and clashed. The way in which Orler’s work was interpreted and felt at that time can be established in the rather dated reviews by critic Paolo Rizzi in the columns of the Gazzettino newspaper. In 1957, on the occasion of an exhibition at the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, he spoke of a “passionate nature, forever in search of new forms of expression” and immediately identified his Picasso roots, roots that had been present since the compositions carried out by the artist in 1954 (works in which Marilena Pasquali was later to identify a Picasso model relating to the “contorted, swarming, strongly expressive figures that populate the Tempests, Ports and Wars”). His ceramics, with a Saint George on display at Bevilacqua La Masa, had, according to him, a “primitive warmth” that struck the observer. A few months later, in 1958, Orler exhibited with his friend Schweizer, again at Bevilacqua La Masa: this time his picassisme was noted as being more evident; but there were also freer compositions in which, according to Rizzi, the artist “better manages to express his undeniable expressive qualities”. A personal exhibition followed at the end of 1959 at the Centro San Vidal gallery, again in Venice. And it was on this occasion that “Orler’s painting acquires the sense of rediscovery, made through new, cunning eyes”. A number of mountain landscapes were then exhibited in which, again according to Rizzi, “one seems to feel the intense expression of a far-off memory, full of warmth”. The most successful pieces were those that “in a style that has the charm of an ingenuous, if not a little coarse, tale, depict the old houses of his hometown, laden with striking, burnished tones, lit up here and there by brightly coloured sketches”: one significant example is an oil painting from 1956 depicting the Mezzano mountain landscape (fig. 5), dominated, almost in discordance, by green meadows and naïf trees (his naïveté was also to be highlighted by de la Souchère; cp. also table 7), by the church and typically Trentine country homes (with woodsheds and piol to dry the corn), volumetrically distorted and, in part, cubistically dissected. Naïf tones, steeped in bitterly nostalgic existentialist reminiscences of a certain southern environment, immortalised by Giuseppe Migneco, can also be found in La Toch, from 1958 (fig. 6) or Procession in Sardinian Costume (fig. 7) and Olive Harvest (fig. 8), both 1959.
Other critics too, such as Guido Perocco and Gigi Scarpa,
praise Orler’s “native” strength, the verity of his mountain nostalgia,
the sentimental and lyrical essence of a style that is outwith
fashionable mannerisms. Again recently (in “Art in
Cortina”, winter 2004), speaking of that period, Paolo Rizzi
recalled “those strong, uncouth paintings, full of energy” that
were “outwith manners […], full of colour, at times agitated following
the Van Gogh impulse” and Davide Orler as a “man of
the mountains […], a ‘pure’ person who has always travelled
along the road to Utopia, between primitive and cultured […]. This is probably the main and most “superficial” reason for the artist’s success and perhaps also for the various public and private acknowledgements he obtained during the prolific Venetian period of the 1950s, exaggerating the exterior and chromatic aspects of this sort of unquestionable naïf lyricism, a naïveté, however, that Pasquali went as far as denying, though inappropriately, in 2003, almost giving the term a connotation of falseness and demagogy not in keeping with the historical reality of that “movement”. In doing so, however, she had lost sight, in our opinion, of the deeper, more authentic meaning to his works that was to flow more freely only in his later production. Thus naïf and “Picassism” (cp. tables 3; 9-11) were to distinguish Orler’s work among the critics for too long, decontextualising such characteristics from the dreamily prophetic (or poetic?) strength underlying his “existential”, strongly emotional paintings. To some extent they were thus made banal and minimised in terms of their more genuine artistic message, even if the “Picassism” of that period in Italy was still considered “premature” and certainly not an adherence to fashion or manner as, unfortunately, it was later to become in many circles and for several painters. Still significant, on the other hand, is his encounter-clash with Peggy Guggenheim, whose drawing room he had been invited into by his Spatialist friend Tancredi (1927-1964): a missed opportunity, certainly (as he himself recalls), but also confirmation of the honesty of his human and artistic temperament, saying a lot for his conception of art, which goes well beyond his “dark tones of the hometown” or the obvious desire to reveal his Picasso roots, later (but we repeat only later!) common to practically all painters. Of greater significance in our opinion to the understanding of the real Orler, avoiding historiographic ambiguity or inaccuracy, is the series of splendid portraits from 1957-1958, some of broadly German and Kirchner descent, from Female Figure (fig.9), painted using fast, black and ochre brush-strokes, and Girl on Armchair (an oil-painting of strong expressionist tones: fig.10) to Portrait of Sculptor Silvio Alchini (of more pronounced realist and psychological tones: fig. 11) and Motherhood (fig.12), this indeed in a more symbolically Picasso style (see also tables 20-24; 27-28). Intervals of serenity during this period are represented by plastic compositions of immediate realism, such as the skilful use of drapery, objects and animals in the enamel on paper Cats and Guitars from 1959 (fig. 13). During this delicate, troubled moment, reflection on sacred readings and French literature - in particular by poet and writer Paul Valéry (1871-1945), unforgettable author of The Graveyard by the Sea - led him to reconsider the youthful pantheistic universe, and to reach a more authentic Christian faith. Other constructive readings of that period regarded the “poètes maudits” - starting with Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) - Paul Verlaine (1844-1896), Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), the avant-garde Russian poets - such as Sergei Aleksandrovi_ Esenin (1895-1925) - and Federico Garcìa Lorca (1898-1936). His religious and existential turning point almost emblematically came to fruition with the destruction of his previous ceramic works, thrown from two barges into solitary narrow streets of Venice in the second half of the 1960s. In the meantime his first prestigious acknowledgement was received in 1960 - a gold medal awarded at the Quadrennial Exhibition in Rome. Indeed 1959/1960, with the appearance of sacred themes in Orler’s works and the finding of his own identity in his relationship with God, can be identified as the moment of his great existential and artistic “turning point”. Hence, in the soft landscapes painted in 1960 and 1961 (St. Erasmus - fig. 14; Flowering Apple Trees on the Lagoon - fig. 15; Homes on St.Erasmus, with solid dispositions of volumes of almost Nordic descent: fig. 16; Venetian View, of unquestionable charm thanks also to the Carrà-style cut in perspective of the buildings reflected in still waters: fig. 17; Nocturnal Scene in Campo Santa Maria Montedomini, with the yellow lighting from homes at night reminding us of some “popular” Leghorn nocturnal scenes by “post-macchiaiolo” painter Renato Natali: fig. 18; Canal in Venice: fig. 19; see also tables 25-26; 29), beyond the appreciable though external naïf elements, the first signs of a serenity, regained with tenacity and effort, can clearly be seen: the radiant daybreak full of hope of a new existential day opens out in Franciscan contemplation of creation, almost as if seen through the eyes of a child (despite him being thirty), with the purity and genuine freshness that transforms everything into a primeval Eden. His nocturnal scenes became silent depictions of peace and serenity and even death (see for example Transit of Saint Francis, 1961: table 63) became acceptable, accepted and almost “sisterly”. As further examples two depictions of the artist’s studio can be observed, respectively from 1958 (table 19) and 1963 (Atelier Interior, fig. 20, in the composition reinterpreting the same subject as Johannes Vermeer in 1666), yet so profoundly different from each other: the first empty (or rather with an absence that is a distressing, impending presence) and “disarranged” into confusion, the second orderly and with the solid physical presence of the painter. Hanged Man (poetic transliteration through the memory of a real news story: see table 37) almost seals off the past, the thick rope “killing off” or rather closing with a past of misfortunes and an age of nightmares and monsters all Freudianly rising from within and projected out, to reach an age of flowering almond trees and radiant sun (see subjects by the same name painted in some of his works from 1964). It is a vision of limpid certainties in a renewed Golden Age in which, almost in a Ficino style, the sun, its light and its heat reflect the peace and greatness of the Divine (“in lumine tuo videbimus Lumen” wrote the Tuscan philosopher in the fifteenth century, at the end of his third book of De vita). And again that interior with the frugal bread and the Bible on a bare old wooden table reflects the authentic aspiration to a rigour and simplicity that belong to a Franciscanism lived through in the belief that even art becomes or may become a providential instrumentum. In 1964 he received a second coveted acknowledgement: the prize awarded by the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa in Venice. Among Orler’s new works of a sacred nature dating back to the 1960s (cp. also tables 62-70), not to be forgotten are two great oil paintings from 1962: On the Cross (fig. 21) and Deposition (fig. 22). The first is a vision of Christ on the cross unusually seen in profile, in which the scarlet red of the loincloth contrasts with the dark blue backdrop and livid landscape with distant echoes of Annigoni, personalised with turgid, “ingenuous” clouds. The second is marked by the solemn positioning of the images, in an extremely modern, difficult composition, but with striking ancient echoes of sacred representation, with precise references also made to the popular primitivism of “Le Douanier” (the customs officer) Henri Rousseau (1844-1910). In Resurrection (fig. 23), from the following year, with more markedly symbolic connotations, Christ, in the flowering garden of new life, emerges from the tomb, overcoming the flames of sin and death with the cross. Further works belonging to this period are genuine, unadulterated portraits contrasting with informal backgrounds of swift, large brush-strokes (Stefano Meneghin, from 1963: fig. 24), simple still lifes of great immediacy with their vivid, glowing colours (Still Life, 1963: fig. 25; Bread, Onion, Fennel and Carrot, 1965: fig. 26; cp. also table 30) and a striking painting depicting Poachers with Spit in the Dolomites (fig. 27), centred around a bright flame that lights up the game while all around, in the darkness of the night, amidst the smoke, the static, exhausted figures of the poachers emerge, which we can interpret as a tribute to certain “omini” (common people) by Ottone Rosai.
Often his paintings, the paintings of this new Orler, converted
into the exuberance of a novice, were now also influenced by
the work of a great Italian painter of the period whom Orler had
met in 1958, admired and held in high esteem - Felice Carena,
who had moved from Florence to Venice after the war. In particular,
from 1967 on, Orler’s so-called “Carena” period, he
transformed the representation of human tragedies from a pessimistic
and passive vision of desperation to an epic moment of
positive and constructive reflection. It was a sanguine and
decidedly nonconformist figurative art, rightly championed as References to death, though present in Orler’s works, are no longer - or ever less frequently - distressing nightmares (as in Behind Bars, from 1965 - fig. 28, with reference once again to Edvard Munch), nor do they represent flight from the suffocating and unbearable vortex of depression, nor dazed, drunken exorcisms in the presence of an oppressing “substance-god”, but rather a quiet, calm and natural observation, a non feared memento mori, symbolised by the repeated presence of the skull his missionary brother Cesare had brought him back from South Africa, the skull of a black youth killed during the fatal period of Apartheid dominated by beastly racism: see Composition with Skull and Pineapple and Composition with Skull, both from 1965, or Flowers, Shells and Skull, from 1968 (fig. 29), that in some respects already establish Orler’s Carena period (compare, for example, Still Life with Skulls and Hourglass painted by Felice Carena in 1950). The transfiguration of that skull into a symbol of resurrection of the spirit beyond death also indirectly becomes quiet social accusation, placing itself on the side of the “little ones” of Evangelic memory. The same serenity shines through the transfiguration of Enchanting Mountain from 1965 (table 40), in which the red sun tinges the deep red mountain tops and cornfields as if during a nocturnal eclipse, or in Sun in Fedai (from the same year), dominated by a gigantic sun on the horizon, enlarged and omnipresent as if seen through striking telescopic lenses. In 1966/1967 Orler returned to his old theme of natural disasters, but this time the “floods” in Mezzano di Primiero, anevent dating back to 4 November 1966 famous above all for the great damage caused in Florence and Venice, reflect a solemnly ethical and vibrantly Carena majesty, far, as mentioned before, from the hopeless, lacerating, screaming desperation of that dawnless dead of night in his works dating back to 1954-1955. A genuine pietas, as Rizzi rightly recalled recently, that goes well beyond “humanly tormenting tones” to rise to the powerfully epic tone of steadfast existential concerted nature. During that period a personal event went on to contribute to strengthening the features of charm and serenity, but also quiet acceptance of dramas and human miseries, that shine through his works: his marriage to life companion Carmela Zanda on 11 February 1966.
At the start of the Sixties Orler also rediscovered collage, but
this time in a new and conceptually nonconformist way, no
longer linked to “Picassisms”. Similar to some experiences of
American and Italian Pop Art (see Fields from the Study - table
46, Fields from the Study in Favaro, both from 1971, or
Countryside at Sunset, from 1972 - fig. 30, with the physical
contribution of colour squeezed directly from the tube) and at
the same time even similar (at still unsuspicious times!) to certain
expressions of the Nouveau Réalisme championed by Pierre Furthermore, the accumulation of broken or discarded objects almost represents the desolating, disenchanted “archaeological find” of the future, ahead of its time, regarding our society, often devoid of profound, lasting values and concepts linked to the Beautiful and Transcendence. A look at his Fields of Pollution from 1975 (table 54) or the piles of ropes and used or broken objects (tables 53; 55-56) suffices to immediately realise as much, though Orler’s reference, even through this waste, to the portrayal of other real spaces and landscapes is always clear in as much as his is and always remains a figurative art, uninfluenced by even significant experiences in the field of Abstraction and the Informal (see Fragment of Landscape; Fields from Plane, table 51; Artist’s Table; Vase of Exotic Flowers, all from 1972). Among these works, we also recall Busillis (fig. 31); Fruit and Composition (fig. 32), of undoubted conceptual assonances with some of Mario Schifano’s collages; Composition with Egg (fig. 33); Large Sun (fig. 34, all from 1974); Landscape in a Storm (fig. 35); Sea - Canaanite Woman (from 1975/2001: fig. 36), up to Untitled (fig. 37), from 1989, in which the bright enamels and blots of paint jeté contrast with the clean geometries of the applied papers, and Clouds and Grasses, from 1994 (fig. 38), that again recalls Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) as does, to a certain extent, Landscape in a Storm no. 3 or Man and Universe, from 1975, in which to an almost Pollock-style dripping visual effect is added, in an action painting that completely invades the support, with an all over result, figurative tones and insertions of collages and various materials that remind us of Pop Art in its Italian and especially Roman Piazza del Popolo version (certain “anaemic landscapes”, “turbulences” or definitions of the human figure in classic and almost Michelangelesque postures that recall Mario Schifano, Franco Angeli and Tano Festa). Again in 1972 Orler took an interest in Ravenna’s great museum cycles as well as art of Byzantine descent, rediscovering the roots of the more genuine original Christian culture (see tables 71-73). His admiration for the world of pre-Renaissance art, so rich in sacred symbols of mystic significance, had already opened him up, or introduced him, almost by chance (or perhaps providentially?) from 1965 on, to knowledge of oriental and particularly Russian icons; it was a meeting, or rather a “lightning strike”, that was to mark his life as a man and artist forever, as he himself recalls not without considerable emotion: “I had been struck by something very far from any concept of art I had been used to during those years, but at the same time it stirred up in me an irresistible magnetic force: perhaps the same force that had shocked Matisse during his journey in Russia at the start of the century and in which Marc Chagall’s work was rooted up to his last pictorial production, the great depictions of the Bible.” The abstract golden backgrounds representing God’s splendour, the unchanging ascetic figures (shrouded by a mystic sensation, both popular and refined), as is unchangeable the divine world they attempt to portray, were to be widely reflected in Davide Orler’s sacred artistic production, in a way that resolutely crosses those unquestionable iconographic assonances present in some Orler works from the Nineties (such as the Angelic Trinity, from 1996 - fig. 39 - and the one from 1997 - table 81 - or the depiction of the Nativity, again from 1997: fig. 40). From 1958 to 1978 Orler held some one hundred personal exhibitions both in Italy and abroad (including quite significant ones in the modern art galleries of Paris and Zurich), but it is 1978 that represents the end of an artistic period, despite painting several frescoes in Tanzania that year (following those in Transvaal in 1972). From then on, and until 1987, for a multitude of incidental reasons his pictorial work thinned out, although several interesting avant-garde collages made from luminescent paper date back to those years as well as a whole series of lesser easel works of far-off landscapes. His great knowledge of art and religious sentiment in Eastern Europe and especially the Russian Motherland, that also so indelibly marked his life as a collector and dealer (leading him to possess, as is widely known, one of the most important collections of Russian icons to be found in Western Europe), above all influenced his later production, from 1987/1989 on and especially from the mid 1990s (a real, new creative youth). By his express desire and with perfect awareness, this work is almost his human and artistic spiritual testament. Reading the Address to Artists written by Paul VI (7 May 1964) and taking even its innermost meaning to heart, he overbearingly (though humbly) wished to affirm that even the Modern can and indeed must have a message of faith, as it has had in the past (a concept later confirmed by John Paul II in his Letter to Artists of 4 April 1999). Indeed as he maintains, and as a refined and sensitive art critic, Elvio Natali, who sadly died recently, had already pointed out in 1988, the fact that “sacred art is still alive today, among many prophecies of death, is borne witness to by documents of great aesthetic value. How can we not cite, among others, Rouault, Chagall, Matisse, Sutherland and, among our own, Manzù, Fazzini or Greco”. Besides, as Fra Angelico had already stated, “to paint Christ, one must live with Christ”. Nevertheless, art has its own laws and even the deepest of faiths cannot itself authenticate religious pictorial art (elevating it to Sacred Art) if not supported by real creative intuition and by the makings of art, represented by the artist’s personal form (i.e. expressive structure), style and rhythm: as poet Vladimir Mayakovski maintained, “the greatest idea will die if we don’t give it a suitable form”. Substantially, Scholasticism’s principle regarding splendor formæ, i.e. the splendour of inner substance through form as essence, remains relevant. In Davide Orler’s great eagerness to launch and leave behind this message of his, almost as if time were not enough (and almost “struggling” against it), man’s great unresolved and unsolvable existential problems pour out onto canvas like an overflowing vortex, through wide, gestural, swift, flowing brush-strokes, vortically creating new works of great emotional impact, like the one hundred depictions inspired by stories from the Old and New Testament, totally alien to any sort of rhetorical pietism or vulgar oleography, made up of neglects and sweetly nauseating ecstasies. At the same time, though influenced by the search for the Truth and the Spirit that shines through Russian sacred icons, Orler remained a western man and artist who followed a different conception from the eastern and orthodox vision of divinity depicted in the icons, in which the Absolute offers itself to man in a static, figurative immobility that is still of Byzantine origins and portrays with the devotion of a pure, exclusive liturgical act, like a mystic sacrament. Western society interprets and sees God as being alive in interiore homine, i.e. descended into the heart of man through Christ and so, as such, can be represented in a dynamically changeable way as can life. And it is the vibrant dynamism present in Orler’s brush-stroke, ever changeable and diverse, though always in the orthodoxy of the dogma, that so wonderfully marks his paintings in an eschatological vision of Christianity that longs for and verges on ecumenism, the way his dynamic, vortical figures long for and verge on the Saviour (cp. table 104). It is an Orler who, setting himself against a flat, debasing materialism and equally against a sterile, banalising angelism, reunites the unity and harmony of the human with the Divine, that meet once again. Lastly, it is the response to Paul VI, who said, addressing the artists, “we need you!”, and to John Paul II, who, again addressing the artists as “ingenious builders of beauty”, hoped there would be “between Gospel and art a fertile alliance” in a renewed dialogue. The first work to strike us in this way is precisely Meeting, from 1989 (fig. 41), a very original and visionary re-examination of Virgilio Guidi’s “meetings”, recast in a real (natural) space and scene and no longer suspended in totally ethereal and timeless luminosity. From 1996 on, this was followed - to add but a few examples to those on display at the exhibition and analysed in the individual files (tables 74-108) - by a bright, polychrome Epiphany, from 1996 (fig. 42), almost a sort of new epiphany of beauty that saves (to quote an expression used by John Paul II, taken from the aforementioned Letter to Artists written at Easter in 1999); Elijah’s Cart , from 1997 (fig. 43), whose vortical dynamism is, to some extent, the sacred reinterpretation of Boccioni and Balla’s futurist work; The Temptations of Saint Anthony, again from 1997 (fig. 44), whose vortex of bewitching figures that transform into monstrous nightmares allude to beauty and sin, with expressionist tones, but also with hints of the Transavantgarde and, in the bright tone of some powerful strokes, the CoBrA group’s Informal. And again we can recall from that prolific year the dramatically realist Slaughter of the Innocents (fig. 45) dominated by the “lashings” of brilliant red on an almost shapeless pile of bodies, or Healing of the Paralytic (fig. 46), harmonious plastic marks trace bodies that remind us of Matisse or perhaps even Cantatore (as in Figure Lying Down, dating back to 1956), whose heads are clear volumes in space, of De Chirico memory. Or again, Deposition (fig. 47), a statically solemn yet dynamic composition, painted using wide, sinuous enamel brush-strokes, that engrave the dramatic power of the scene that stands out against a Klein bluenocturnal background. The Good Samaritan, from 1999, is a striking work in tones of ochre and blue in which the steady, essential lines hint at human figures and animals and at the landscape we can sense and imagine supporting the strong charisma of Christian pietas that overbearingly shines through the painting. His model, in compliance with the post-conciliar church sentiment, is that of the Christus patiens, a clear reference point for torment and modern anxieties, rather than the Christus triumphans dear to a more serene and dogmatic age than our own. Transforming the theological message of eastern iconology, his art is not “sacred”, i.e. it is not painted by the hand (mind) of man, unchangeable Divine expression lowered by heavenly revelation, but “religious” art, that is to say driven by faith ab imo hominis towards the Saviour. In Appeased Storm (fig. 48: an enamel and oil on jute from 2000) the vortical and synthetic dynamism of the scene seems to revolve entirely around the imposing scarlet figure of a Christ barely intimated by an intense brush-stroke, in which Orler’s entire furor pingendi is concentrated and given substance. Substantially, his way of painting changes; the transparent luminosity is rendered by brilliant, iridescent primary colours, with no shades; the ample, sinuous brush-stroke gets tangled up drawing earthly and heavenly figures, almost like skeins of polychrome wool, through which the canvas below and back-ground landscape shine. Expressionistically unreal tones kindle those characters whose symbolically ellipsoid-shaped heads, often devoid of features, recall, as was said before, surreal De Chirico universes. Often the use of spray paint (already experimented by him in the Seventies, but now re-employed having greater command of the technique) bestows upon the settings and sacred figures an ethereal aura of silent and mystic religiousness. His way of painting, his resolute drawing, his strong colours full of light, as was said, clearly manifest his fascination for the German roots of the great expressionism, from his beginnings with Brücke (see, for example, the various portraits of Marcella by Ernest Ludwig Kirchner, whose strong black marking of contours, bright colour of garments, environments and still lifes made up of daily objects had some unquestionable influence on certain works by Orler). But it was perhaps, above all, Max Beckmann’s German-American chromatic expressionism that may find greater cultural assonances with our own, united with its strong oneiric (at the recent Cortina d’Ampezzo exhibition his work was defined as being “an opening into dreams”) and metaphysical background mentioned earlier. Thus it is that in his symbolism we can identify echoes of Joan Mirò’s surrealism or Marc Chagall’s “tales”, in which the latter’s poetic narrative is, however, often expressed in vortical, dazzling flashes. And again we could identify, in certain productions still linked to his experiences of the Sixties, skilled French and Italian citations: from Henri Matisse, to Osvaldo Licini or partly to Enrico Baj. In the end, however, all this is of little importance since Orler revises these more or less desired or unconscious echoes in a decidedly independent and always very personal form of painting. In a figurative and symbolic world of Nordic descent, however, we can also recognise a skilful revision, from a decidedly modern point of view, of characters, as mentioned before, of Russian and eastern rite, though rich in tension and a primitive emotiveness that places his far-off origins in a “forgotten” but not altogether removed “Sturm und Drang” pathos, transformed Italian-style into lively, violent Mediterranean tones (of Sicilian and Migneco descent) or into hazy moonlights of suffused Venetian luminosity, with references made to Picasso, De Chirico and Guttuso himself. As said before, sharp, bright, absolute colours, at times in clear, evanescent fading; essentiality of the stroke, in an overbearing assumption of the restoration of the supremacy of drawing and painting; stylistic eclecticism with a taste for the citing of themes from the historical avant-gardes eminently of an expressionist, primitivist and fantastic nature, hinting at the intellectual and stylistic nomadism of the Italian Transavantgarde, or the German New Savages, but extensively personalised according to an unmistakable personal “way”, as only an artist with great experience can accomplish (but at the same time, despite being over seventy, with the energy and vitality of a younger man), they provide environments, characters and, above all, old sensations that speak directly and with a very modern and easy language to today’s complex and contradictorily troubled society and to the heart of man: and here, in our opinion, resides Davide Orler’s truest and most genuine art, a cultured and “humble” message, made up of sensations and conceptualities beyond ideologies, avant-gardes and fashions, made up of pathos and logos, united with a superb thecne, i.e. an innate ability to draw and in the various pictorial techniques, an authentic cultural message of art, life and faith - mindful of the past but projected into the future - for the “traveller” in this troubled, pragmatic and chaotic start to the twenty-first century. For this reason we decided to start by citing, almost summing up his long journey as a man and artist, the lines dedicated to Marcel Proust by Giovanna Fozzer, a friend of the artist who shared and shares with him man’s deepest and most universal vital vibrations as well as those of the “nature-soul” in search of a meaning and a sense to existence, subtracting it from our age’s existential anxieties. Or, as in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, it is the extraordinary story of Orler’s artistic existence and victory - aimed at spying on the unconscious and searching for the deep-rooted ego in memory - firstly over dissipating, pantheistic worldly life and secondly over time itself, by means of Art that redeems all. |
Landscape in Mezzano, 1956, oil on canvas, particular
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Olive Harvest , 1959,oil on canvas, particular
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Campo Santa Maria Mater Domini , 1961,oil on canvas, particular
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Flowers, Shells and Skull , 1968,oil on canvas, 45x75 cm, particular
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Clouds and Grasses , 1994,mixed technique, particular
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Meeting , 1989,enamels on jute, particular
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Elijah’s Cart , 1997,enamels on canvas, particular
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Healing of the Paralytic , 1997,enamels on canvas, particular
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Deposition , 1997,enamels on canvas, particular
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