Biography
GHOSTS IN THE VOID
(The Paintings of Lorenzo Puglisi)
by Mark Gisbourne
The history of painting is embedded within the perceptual realities of presence and intuited absence. In both the here and the not here, in states of material substance and that which is speculatively imagined. Yet at the same time there is always a certain feeling or apparitional quality to all painting, if we mean by ‘apparition’ the idea of a remarkable or unexpected appearance of someone or previously unimagined something that suddenly comes into view. Since we know as Mallarmé long ago observed, “It is in front of his sheet of paper that the artist creates himself,” just as the blank canvas stands before the painter as a spatially creative void to be filled. And references to the void has a particular resonance in the black paintings of the Italian painter Lorenzo Puglisi, since his use of open emptiness is punctuated in order to be filled. And at the same time the filling of the void in this instance has a particularly French resonance in the current context of Paris, where the famed Yves Klein exhibited and thereafter took his famous psychological and semi-literal ‘leap into the void’. The void of course inevitably stands in for the greater cosmos, a place of darkness punctuated by light that was of such fascination to Blanqui and to Benjamin. Yet it is in the punctuated void or darkness that vision emerges. For as it is in dreams, so it remains in the creative life. And the indefinite achromatic conditions of blackness and whiteness are the underpinning stages of materiality that shape and direct the paintings of Puglisi. But as acknowledged black and white are common metaphors referring to creative clarity, and in consequence necessarily allude to human states of insight. Not surprisingly therefore for Puglisi materiality allied to the history of art stand as fundamental concerns at the centre of his painting practice. And the achromatic use of black for either night-time scenes, or, as a forms of autonomous expression, has a long history, and black, as either matter or consciousness¬, as substance or metaphor, forms a continuous and thoroughly integrated psychical aspect of this Italian artist’s work.
Ghosts in the void
Ghosts are apparitions by another name, similarly spectres, phantoms, wraiths, spirits, presences, or visions, and there are many other popular and adaptable epithets that might also be applied. But the most important aspect is as to whether the ghosts are possessed of a psychologically revenant nature or merely those of purely fictional projection. In other words are they apparitions with resonant aspects as distinct from mere fanciful constructions. The ghostly part-figures that are seen in Puglisi’s paintings are often intended to be self-revealing psychical doubles of themselves. They are spectral appearances that have a presence and historical relevance as autonomous paintings, and at the same time they are often opaque but complex metaphors to paintings of pre-existence. Hence they operate within an internalised visual sphere of simultaneous text and context—as optical projections of both things seen and things psychically imagined. [...]
