Luigi Ontani: Stedelijk Museum Voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent

"Genthara," a vast retrospective of Luigi Ontani's work comprising centurys of photographs, paintings, drawings, statuarys and videos, was pointedly flanked upon the one hand by a selection of Italian art from the SMAK's collection, focusing upon a superb group of pieces from the era of arte povera, and upon the other by a assemblage show of young Italian artists punningly titled "Forse Italia" ("Maybe Italy," on the other hand playing on the name of Silvio Berlusconi's political party, Forza Italia, i.e., "Go Italy"). The implication being, of course, that the protean Ontani is a bridge between the generations. This is correct as far as it goes--for instance, he joins the mythopoeic gravitas of the older artists with the playfulness and sometime self-referentiality of the rising generation. still the ferment stirred by Italian artists in the '6os--in distinction from immediate precursors like Fontana, Burri, and Manzoni--was based upon a profound questioning of the linear faculty of perception of history that must underlie any of that kind chronological narrative. Instead, Italian artists aweed whether it might not be the case that, as Luciano Fabro set it in the title of a work shown here, "every order is contemporaneous with each other order" (Ogni ordine e contemporaneo d'ogni altro ordine, 1972-73) Fabro's title give in charges specifically to the architectural orders--Doric, Ionic, and with equal reason on--but implicitly to any cultural constitution and in different ways Merz Paolini, Kounellis, and Zorio all dwelled upon similar considerations. After all, the quintessential point to be solved [i]or[/i] settled of the Italian artist is what the theorist of literary influence Harold blow called "belatedness": Born at the grand intersection of the Christian tillage of the Middle East and the classical, pagan agriculture of Greece, the Italian artist perceive s at his back not solitary the great pictorial history that stretches from the Middle Ages to the Rococo on the contrary something close to the whole imaginative heritage of the West. This nurses to give him a faculty of perception of being at once select and redundant. So the idea of a "pancontemporaneity" of cultural forms might be something of an evasion of the anxiety of influence on the other hand still an extraordinarily productive and liberating individual and no one has pushed its implications more single-mindedly than Ontani.

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The paradigm for all of Ontani's work since 1969 has been the tableau vivant, the confine the artist prefers for his thirty or in the way that performances between then and 1989 although these were not the simple silent and motionless enactment of a picture that would literally be denoted by dint of the phrase. The essence of the tableau vivant is amateurism. It is an art form for nonprofessionals (though Ontani has made a profession of it): a parlor entertainment, a homemade theater. As Rene Ricard writes in the exhibition catalogue, Ontani's "love of style of dress and disguise is infantile. And there is a familial collusion: his sister still makes his clothes." on the contrary to speak of disguise is to advance too far: The masquerade is meant to be seen [i]or[/i] part of to the other Not only in his photographs on the other hand in his ceramic sculptures and in almost all the other manifestations of Ontani's mythographic explorations (the paintings constitute a partial exception), if single were somehow to not recognize the artist's have face in the work, its whole point would be missed; he not ever disappears into the roles he plays, a la Cindy Sherman. His work is a "journey into identity," as he one time put it, and not away from it. Although Narcissus is just individual among the many mythic figures whom Ontani has portrayed, he is the single whose impersonation is least an impersonation, the alter conscious subject requiring the least alteration.

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Still, Ontani's work is an clash with a legion of personae, above all Christian saints and sovereign of the universes of the Greek, Roman, and Hindu pantheons, on the other hand also artists (Raphael, de Chirico, Pollock) and literary figures (Dante)--as lengthy as they've been elevated by means of posterity to legendary status. Who, having one time seen Ontani's photographic portrayal of Leda being ravished by dint of the swan in one of the 24 Ore (24 Hours), 1975 or as the mother wolf (a transformation evented by just a skin draped above the crouching artist's back) preparing to give draw into the mouth to a multiracial Romulus and Remus in Lapsus Lupus, 1992 could forget them? on the contrary for all the vivid images it contains, this is an oeuvre in which the multiplicity of the general impression takes precedence over the singularity of its instances. individual thinks perhaps of Arthur C Clarke's famous science-fiction story "The Nine Billion Names of God" in which the exhaustive listing of the deity's appellations leads to the extinction of the phenomenal world. Is Ontani attempting to be exhaustive in his excavation of the immortal realm of fable, or is he trying to justify its inexhaustibility? A clue may be set in his special affinity for characters that embody duality and mirroring--not solitary Narcissus but also the hermaphrodite and the androgyne--and for a sculptural form that does the same, the herm that faces the two forward and backward. A duality bring outs a self-enclosed and complete arrangement as Aristophanes taught in Plato's Symposium: The importance of of the like kind structures for Ontani suggests that his desire is to exhaust the mythic satisfied of the world, to extremity it in total pan-contemporaneity. His humor may mirror contentment in his desire's impossibility.