Still Life as a Dream in a Mythological World by Renato Miracco
The repeated dire warnings of the probable, possible, hoped-for, unlikely (and the list could go on) DEATH OF ART, which has hounded us since the beginning of the 20 th Century, have revealed the (luckily, some say) crumbling of a cultural universe. And in identifying a sole ideal model, the monotheistic approach loses its foundation. Thus, if on one hand CHAOS appears to emerge, on the other hand the Places of the Gods and Goddesses open, and they return to us in a variety of polychrome and polycentric cosmos.
Imbued as we sstill are with 19th century aesthetics – as a reproducibility of what is real – we, the viewere and the beneficiaries, should feel the duty, each and every time, to decipher the types of communication with hich each artist has chosen to convey his or her own internal world, and to identify the aesthetics canon of artistic quality.
Talking about our daily exhibition of Durante we jave consider where Damiano Durante came from.
In Italy, the emergence of Still Life as a genre in its own right occurred around 1600, fostered partly by the new taste for naturalism: an aesthetic which received its highest expression in the work of Caravaggio and is many followers.
Italian Still Life painting is distinguished from that of other countries in many ways, notwithstanding the cross – fertilization ideas and motifs. The direct study of nature learned color exercies included insects, butterflies and flowers, statues, musical instruments, book and precious objects.
But in today’s exhibition we have to notice another element: Mythos! Why?
We must understand, first and foremost, that art, as in the past, is a product of its Society, albeit with different modes and codes: this gives the word “Society” a much more real and tangible meaning.
And what Durante is depicting is our daily desire for a dream for an archaic world full of Mythology.
The Still Life, his Still Life, can therefore be considered a blend of RES and APPARITION as the Philosopher Adorno loved to call it.
The union involves a spiritualization of the artwork in which its mere materiality falls away in order to point toward a more elevated spiritual communication.
The English sense of Still life is “Silent Life” whilst the Dutch sense (stillben) is “Posed Nature”: in either sense, there is always a recourse to a reality which goes beyond the contingent data. In this way the Still Life can become a key that opens the most private, hidden and silent world of the painter. It is the diaphragm between reality and ascetic reality, between the physical and metaphysical worlds or if you prefer today between the metaphysical and mythological world mere materiality falls away in order to point toward a more elevated spiritual communication.
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