SPRING FORWARD BEYOND THE LIGHT OF TOMORROW

BY BRANDON KENNEDY

Looking askance or with downcast eyes, faces in profile while glancing off-camera. A momentary pause built in between, before the next moment, the awaited reply, a shared tenderness, an eventual departure.

Details accumulate from one composition to the next: glinting rings in nose, ear, or on fingers; the rhythm of tulips and matching cardinal against a picket fence; stemmed flora on forearms or tabletop lampshades; an eyed, poised housefly; receding animal tracks in the snow, the notes of bare tree trunks stepping up the beat just ahead.

The artist declined to be interviewed for this article “[as he] often uses himself as the subject in his work…he prefers to keep his voice removed,” says exhibition curator Rob Teeters. Nevertheless, we soon encounter Giangiacomo Rossetti, the painter as subject, navigating a slim architectural passage from darkness into light in Through a Thin Wall (2021). Muted octagonal tiles are cast in shadow as the figure traverses the opening, searching for sure footing, splayed hands outstretched for balance, transitioning into the newness of cast shadows alerting us to form.

Exacting postures and blank expressions befit the muted silences that often lie within the compressed filmic compositions of Rossetti’s paintings. Within the appointed environs of an upscale cocktail bar, our gaze meanders across the seeming unease of a young, possibly disconsolate couple loosely tending to their martinis. Just above, an abstracted elongation of colorful skaters on a frozen woodside pond does little to quell their spirits. A perfect screen of cartoon snow counters the somber darkness falling from the table’s edge and below the leather banquette. Everyone has their own strange ideas (2022) is a subtle yet absurd summation of the disparate reads of body language and its crystallization of form as sometimes seen in fashion photography. The protraction of desire as wrung by the lens of disinterested voyeurism. Check, please.

Thrown into the transitory, the tension beginning to sense its own reasoning, making us complicit in its revealing all the while. Perhaps no painting of Rossetti’s (and its carved, vibratory frame) better exemplifies this state of causal transition like the shadowed figure of Orpheus glancing backwards as he reenters the Earthly realm, losing unseen Eurydice unto Hades for eternity.

The third stanza of Sonnet XVI, Book Two of Rilke’s paean to the fateful couple, speaks “… of the spring which is heard here, from which only the dead man drinks, God silently winks, the dead” (my summary translation). The complete stanza in its original German serves as the painting’s title, as fortune’s gatekeeper. The irrevocable moment marked by a loving pause, forever altering the future.

Rossetti also mines art history for iconography and compositional strategies. El Greco’s moody skies and atmospheric landscapes cast a pall over a standing male nude and artist self-portrait suited and attendant below. This painting has a quizzical title in Italian regarding how “The Chinese tell time by the cat’s eyes” (my poetic translation). Again, I think we all can agree that everything is always in flux and yet still all connected here. Clocks and watches are hereby put on notice or should stop altogether.

Rossetti’s figural gestures can also evoke Picasso’s early Family of Saltimbanques or Harlequins or even the tortured poses of Rodin’s The Burghers of Calais in his couples or groupings of figures. Though—in fact, just as often—subjects can alter the picture plane altogether, forcing The American Friend (2022) and his flag shirt face-first before receding trees; or implore our eyes to visually unfold a spooky, pyramidal montage of the gathering of seasonal beans in Crepuscular Harvest (2019).

We are witnesses to the tensions residing in a romantic or situational coupling, whether attitudinal, withholding, or disarming in stature. The possibilities can be furthered by geography, longing suppressed by an austerity in the retelling, or a complexity exaggerated by memory. There’s a compression or an expanse at hand, or—at best— even an opportunity for both to occur.

In more than a nod to the Italian futurist Giacomo Balla, Rossetti deftly reinterprets his Spiritual Scene (1925-30) by re-placing his artist profile self-portrait amidst the spectral waves of light and motion, set aglow by his disembodied hands and intense visionary trance. His gaze is focused beyond, into the cosmic abyss of “man and woman in the fluid penetrated by light”—the subtitle of both Balla’s and Rossetti’s transcendental artworks.

There is a consistent grasping at in-between states here, traversing the chthonic threshold that stands between the known and beyond. We gaze straight into one and back unto the other; it does the same with us. The Milanese painter now living in Brooklyn, the future unto the past. Paintings pausing briefly before speaking to the ether, yet again, forever.