What is Pittura Metafisica?
After grinding to something of a halt with perhaps too many open threads to my project and now the added complications of the Covid 19 lockdown I turned to research again in an attempt to make sense of my newest compositions made with the images captured form the early March Road trip. After making an image at Monument Valley, a straight shot looking out of my hotel room at the extraordinary view it seemed almost faked although its a totally straight shot.
I started to experiment adding new views to other interiors captured during the trip.
In these cases I combined the interior of a laundrette I found in Albuquerque with White Sands National Monument and a US Army missile display bizarrely in a layby on the road to Alamogordo, New Mexico with the interior of a Wendys restaurant. Again I wanted these to look like the could be real but a little off, aiming to replicate the feeling I got from my straight shot at Monument Valley.
So I was very excited to discover the Pittura Metafisica or Metaphyscal Art Movement and the work of Georgio de Chiroco. A movement created by Giorgio de Chirico and the former futurist, Carlo Carra, in the north Italian city of Ferrara around 1917.
De Chirico aimed to dismantle reality through a literal change of perspective, the alternation of shadows and light, and a reinterpretation of mundane objects, which undoubtedly challenges the viewer to contemplate the piece and to search for the virtual which the actual stands for. To achieve this, de Chirico used familiar subjects and popular artifacts and placed them into unexpected contexts. This is exactly my aim too. Moving my story to occupy interior spaces, creating a framing of my original scene with the overlay.
Using a realist style, they painted the squares typical of such Italian cities but the squares are unnaturally empty, and in them objects and statues are brought together in strange juxtapositions. The artists thus created a visionary world of the mind, beyond physical reality – hence the name.
The brief analysis of the painting is generally applicable to the very concept of Pittura Metafisica. The idea behind it relies on a supposition, or rather a decision, that the physical world is not presenting reality as it is. Strinati even relates the momentum of Pittura Metafisica’s conception to de Chirico’s physical state, since it was a period of time in which he was recovering from an illness, and therefore aiming to reconcile his body, spirit and soul and to achieve the harmony of being.
“I believe that nothing can be more abstract, more unreal, than what we actually see. We know that… the objective world… never really exists as we see and understand it… has no intrinsic meaning of its own, such as the meanings that we attach to it.” – Giorgio Morandi
Metaphysical painting was born from the artist’s intent to create a world that does not exist in reality. A world capable of enhancing the intrinsic beauty of objects and matter.
A fundamental aspect is its ambiguous and paradoxical character . The artist reproduces objects and elements of the real world, combining them and combining them in an absurd way. In this way the objects are stripped of their usual meanings, the work loses its link with reality and is placed outside it.
Another important aspect is the sense of mystery and restlessness that pervades the scene. The positioning of the work outside of time and physical space gives rise to a sense of disorientation, of enigma in metaphysical painting one must recognise an ironic and clearly ambiguous component. It is precisely this particular component that captures the interest of the surrealists, who see de Chirico’s metaphysical painting as one of the roots of Surrealism.
references
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/m/metaphysical-art
http://dailyartist.blogspot.com/2011/03/carlo-carra-february-11-1881-april-13.html
http://xoomer.virgilio.it/adi_maggio/1916_artemetafisica.htm