The Brooklyn Rail

one instant of morning
rendered him time
and opened him space,
one whole without seam.
–Charles Tomlinson, from “The Greeting”

Late in life, Giorgio Morandi (1890–1964) saw for the first time Chardin’s Young Man Building a House of Cards (ca. 1735). We’re told he was fascinated by Chardin’s rendering of shadows and delicate masses, but there was more to it than a painter’s interest. Perhaps it was the subject itself and behind it the notion of poise.

For Morandi, time seems to have been a succession of poised instants in which the subject, its space, and moment were delivered whole and “without seam.” This is a metaphysical position, and looking at the beautiful selection of sixty of Morandi’s works brought together by Galleria Mattia De Luca and curator Marilena Pasquali, I could not help feeling that I was in the presence of a medieval attentiveness, of a Plotinus, say, or any of the inheritors of Aristotle and St. Augustine. And why not? Morandi’s work has always been a screen on which various periods and movements have projected themselves. It has been variously read as Symbolist, Cubist, Futurist, Surrealist, Minimalist before the fact, and even Fascist. (Morandi published his brief autobiographical sketch in a Fascist journal in 1928.) And Morandi himself listed a long lineage of influences, from Giotto to Cézanne. So who is Morandi now? For me, an unsentimental and distant observer of an autonomous world.

“There is nothing more surreal and nothing more abstract than reality,” Morandi famously remarked in a radio interview on Voice of America, and the quietness of his work seems to emanate precisely from its deliberate reduction to basics: simple geometric forms of the objects—bottles, vases, and boxes—that he painted in his studio for decades. Even his landscapes and still-life flower paintings, offered here in a generous selection, have less to do with the look and feel of things than the idea they suggested to him. The exhibition’s placement of paintings in the setting of an Upper East Side townhouse made the point repeatedly. A simple vase and flowers from 1952 stood at the head of the stairway to the second floor, Platonic in its absoluteness, except for the thin shadow the vase cast in a light that seemed unlike any ever viewed by human eyes. An almost comically perfect sculptural arrangement of a white bottle, two glasses and a vase, Natura morta (1960) hung over an ornate fireplace mantle in the townhouse. The objects cast no shadow, in a light without source or time.

Rather than leaving pictures in our heads, Morandi leaves an idea in the mind, simple and still as bottles and glasses on a shelf. The reality of his evolution is somewhat messier. The exhibition highlighted his early stylistic forays into Cubism and Futurism, as well as his reliance on heavy impasto. This gradually gave way to calmer surfaces and the signature technique of treating his canvases with white gesso to damp down the color palette, leaving us free of anecdote or narrative to focus on… what exactly? One room of the exhibition gave a clue. It carefully displayed a group of still lifes that set up the rhythm of a game as Morandi, from painting to painting, shifted the number of objects, their placement, and their treatment vis-à-vis light and shadow. In this single room, it was possible to grasp how he could work this meager material for so many years. The variety was potentially infinite. Contrary to the title of the exhibition, time was not suspended in that room; it was constructed and explored, a medium like the paint itself.

It is not happenstance that Morandi’s studio would be attractive to photographers—Luigi Ghirri and Joel Meyerowitz, to name just two. In their approach, the camera becomes the stand-in for the painter himself, capturing the objects in natural light and transforming three dimensions into two. But the camera is precisely a tool for suspending time even as it registers a moment’s particularity, and Morandi seems to have had no interest in particular moments. He built them through sight and imagination, and seeing such constructions together gave a sense of time gathering, accumulating.

If this seems too detached a description for paintings so unpretentious and easy to love, the work inspires a certain reflectiveness. A group of drawings from the late 1950s in a fascinating room displaying works on paper seemed to do nothing more than pose a question: what is it that can be represented at all? They presented little more than some gray shapes floating on nothing. Morandi expressed an interest in Chinese and Japanese painting, and the utterly reductive simplicity of his drawings recalled Muqi’s Six Persimmons (thirteenth century), the most famous of Zen images. Although Chinese painters of that time tended to think cosmologically rather than analytically, connecting themselves to their subjects and the fabric of all experience through memory and imagination, Morandi, too, painting much like a monk in his own monastery, seems to have approached this seamlessness.