Paolo Carosone

THE MIRROR AS MEMORY
A Small Dictionary for Paolo Carosone



Reading the biographical notes included in his previous catalogues one perceives two distinct tendencies: the entire world intended as a stage for his work (he isn't foreign to any country except perhaps to Italy), and the humour which experimentally justifies his memory. As a calculated encyclopedia of the possible, I read in these last works a type of Noah's Ark of twentieth-century myths (indeed, a collection of ali the myths our century has recovered.) Today a fin-de-siècle painter like Paolo Carosone (otherwise labeled post modern) can only have an encyclopedic conversation with the image. His purpose, all cerebral and sophist, is to arrest space and time in the eternal myth of an arrow which always misses its aim, of a fleet-foot which is continually surpassed.
This work of great precisìon and beauty (yes, indeed, let us use again the feared word) succeeds in concealing in its depths the age old problems of the enigma and hermeticism, those themes which I will attempt to reveal in this small dictionary.
What is the real artistic process? Just as certain artists patiently address the problem of painting (and these are the most interesting artists working today), Carosone stresses analytically the problem of illustration. A hyper-drawing.

EQUILIBRIUM (see TIME)
Carosone's final image looks like a collage, but in fact it is a world in delicate balance. A fragment rests on another generating the figure, while the artist reserves the task of catching the istantaneous moment in which things are just so, shortly before they were not and in a moment they won't be any longer. He grasps a nonexistent world in the ephimery of existence. Using the means of a game, he passes on to his descendants a house of cards. He mirrors in his daily work the duplicity and cruelty of existence on the biade of a sword.

PHOTOGRAPHY
The graphic technique relates to the technique of photography. But without the tiredness of recent experiments (which are the mimesis of a technique and not its exaltation). The more things are real the more they seem imaginary. The absolute "realer than real" is just the means Carosone selects to achieve the impalpable poetry of the imaginary.
The technique of the camera oscura is evident in the portraits which, however, exclude the pose so common in the photography studio. It is a dialogue on method and time. The young Federico is mirrored in the explicative text (looking towards the future); the small Leonetta observes her identifying inscription; the adolescent Antonio questions age (that Lysippean caged eros).

GRAPHIC ART
A final choice and not a point of departure. When Carosone exhibited at the Calcografia Nazionale in Rome in 1966 Maurizio Calvesi explained that graphic art is the most useful documentary medium (the most up-to-date for the Pop artists) in search of a common denominator.
And, in fact, with his white sheet Carosone succeeds in negating that many faceted world which is assembled on the sheet. By drawing with fine lead he joins the fragments side-byside and equates them. And drawing becomes again, as it was for the Surrealists, the automatic revelation of the unconscious, the rediscovery of the profound (mine as in minerai). His graphic line, which owes a tribute to Dúrer, is merciless and so metaphysical,

ICONOGRAPHY (ICONOLOGY)
Too many themes and meanings are revealed in his works for us nqt to suspect that Carosone avoids a precise and unilateral interpretation. He skips over Erwin Panofsky and goes directly to the sources in order to verify, or perhaps confuse those ancient encyclopedias: The Emblemata of Cesare Ripa, the Iconologia of Vincenzo Cartari, the Images of the ancient gods of Andrea Alciato.
The composite image creates a subtraction; the multiplied image divìdes itself.
There is no solution to the problem because the problem does not exist. The only problem is the eternal problem, that of existence. Indeed, the rea[ theme is that of the image with a capitol I: there is no single image in itself but only its confrontatìon with the image composed of many images, as both de Chirico and Savinio knew so well when they understood the enigma as a mirror: obscurely.

MEMORY (see TIME)
For many years Carosone projected himself into the future. The missile was his index finger pointed towards the universe; the machine was his method of apprehension. Now, like an oracle (one who has the memory of the future) he projects himself only into the past. And thus his images parade like figures on a runway, the Laócoon (he suffers more than the twentieth-century man) and the lute, drapery and the archetypal Venus, the turbaned woman of Piero di Cosimo and the Flemish proscenium, Castel Sant'Angelo and the reflected mirror. Nothing is more important to Carosone than the cast of time.

MIRROR (see PHOTOGRAPHY)
And here is another enigma of the suffering double: from Narcissus to television. In Carosone's work the mirror is present as an image and as a universal method; the copy of antique sculpture and images - here is a mirror in use. Each of these works seems to be reflected and only the signature tells us that we are not standing before a mirror (unless Carosone wished to sign the mirror and not the work). Thus Ariadne is reflected in the melancholy which doubles in the labyrinth. Indeed, there was a mirror among the toys of the young Dionysus.

TIME (see MEMORY)
Today exists with yesterday and tomorrow has jut passed. In each work we find the indication of visual instruments (clock, skull, hour-glass, the indication of the hour and the year), but each work is also the active representation of the problem of a time which inverts itself: Tempus filius Veritatis.
Carosone relates to the many artists who were concerned with the image and the word, including Paolini, Borges, Mariani and Savinio, artists which many believe represent their own past or neoclassicism or the tragedy of infancy but in fact they speak only of the Great Problem.

VANITY (see MIRROR)
The stili life of a stili life. This too is in the work of Carosone. He often cites this ancient artistic medium in order to facilitate the task of the spectator while he removes him from the real problem. Smoke and music, mirror and candle, sculpture and drapery are also the eternal allusion to the senses: the obtaining of a "fake" surface which can be tactile and optical, olfactory and audial, visual. In other words sensual.
Like the harbinger of a new fin-de-siècle Carosone speaks of vanity of vanities, on the eve of a twenty-first century which is no longer a twenty-first century.

MAURIZIO FAGIOLO dell'ARCO