LEONARDO SCIASCIA
I have been following Tranchino’s work for more than twenty years, ever since, I remember not in what newspaper or for what exhibition, I saw a reproduction of a picture of his, and, happening to be in Siracusa, with Dominique Fernandez – who then used to spend her summers in a little house by the sea at Pachino – we went along to his studio. Work, I am here using the word improperly, in a manner of speaking: Tranchino, à la Stendhal, à la Savinio, does not work (and I recall a memorable page by Savinio, introducing a collection of lithographs by Fabrizio Clerici),he enjoys himself, that is to say, he paints with delight, with pleasure, as on a prolonged vacation – so very prolonged -, continuous and intense enough to absorb his whole life. And perhaps precisely from this stems the attention, the association, the friendship that binds us: from our reciprocal recognition of each other as amateurs, ones who work with love and delight, precisely in the sense used by Savinio regarding Clerici. And it is not that working with delight excludes the spadework, the research, the anguish and the travail, looking inside oneself at times with dismay, and looking outside with prehensile attention and at times avidly: but in a sphere, always, of “enjoyment”, of an existential game. A game in which a large part is played by the memory, its transmutation or change into myth, into fable: being aware of the present, and also of destiny; and like this running over the images, the metaphors, the emblems, from Homer to Conrad, with certain Borgesian glosses.
Born in Siracusa in 1938, Tranchino has never been away except for very short periods, to attend his exhibitions or to see those of other artists whom he find congenial, in Italy and abroad. I believe his longest stay away was in Paris, to learn the technique of aquafortis, a means of expression that increasingly attracts him (and we should also note, in the last few years, the greater intensity of his drawing, a stronger element of design in his painting).
Oeininger said that you can be born and you can die, but you cannot live, in Siracusa. He was thinking, perhaps, of Platen, who went to die there. But Tranchino not only lives there serenely, but relives its distant myths (which at times appear as “citations” of De Chirico, of Savinio) and those of childhood: between the sea and the countryside, in the exhumed splendour of an incomparable civilization.
(Corriere della Sera, Luglio, 1986)
Translated by Peter Glendening
Claude AMBROISE
THE ISLAND NEVER LEFT
What is the purpose of leaving, even on one of those ships as ever tied up along the dock, almost an invitation to travel? Sicily can become unbearable. So much so that at some point, not long ago, in the mind and in the very body of the painter Tranchino, the earthquake reasserted itself: a kind of seismic ghost on the canvases of his studio on Siracusa’s Mastra Rua. Not that his is some natural or architectonic world, destroyed along with the orthogonal law that supported it, a declaration of chaos; but the forms of his paintings seem born out of deep, tectonic forces, in the suspension of unbalanced balconies or walls of a garden, dwarf palms and broken columns, a man haunted by a book, interstitial patches of colour, that house, these landings…
Inside every Sicilian is the experience of the earthquake, even if it is only atavistic. As in Enzo Consolo’s books in which the catastrophe is narrated through metaphor. Had such a catastrophe not occurred in language too, and early on, we would not now be drawn to “Il sorriso dell’ignoto marinaio” and other tales. Something similar has happened in the paintings of Tranchino, where telluric forces have set him free, indeed surrealistically, from the preestablished harmony of the world.
Following the earthquake it is normal to rebuild from scratch, but many of the pictures of the Siracusan painter refuse this Sisyphean labour; they propose instead a different world from the one gone before, one in which the relation between colours and objects has been reinvented, the relationship of objects to one another, the very configuration of space… This was especially the case in his work of some years ago.
Even today his audience continues to be provoked by this experience of the earthquake. The barrier of naturalism will not be restored: there is the dissociation between compound forms and colours, the light taking its origins from the South, but the canvas changes under the chill rays of sunlight which cross it, revealing a vegetal recess: the objects, even those on a large scale, often derive from toys recovered from his childhood. Except that the meanings have been rigorously individualised, not simply juxtaposed, created through combination and interstitial spacing, like the telling elements of an ancient tale. These are Tranchino’s signifiers, the signifiers of his journey: the dreaming traveller who does not leave his island but paints the world and its objects, which in turn refer to him, revealing him as they also reveal the one who views and is captivated by their charm.
Just as Van Gogh’s boots were emblems for the Dutch painter, the boats, the car, the tail of a plane – and not least the colours used to depict them – point towards Tranchino the man. His boat is a captured object in the arms of the harbour, his car a capturing object whose windscreen retains an ellipse of the landscape, his little dog questions the pictures and jumps about inside of them, the columns and the plants rise up, the rounded banisters indicate a turning… On the dock or in the garden there is a man, often reading, on one occasion writing; at any moment he may become distracted from his reading, with his back to the sea, or perhaps may catch a glimpse of it, attracted by the distant, shaded view that finds him through the foliage.
Tranchino the man lives in Siracusa, and Siracusa is a port, an invitation to the open sea and travel, but the painter will not embark on a voyage around the world. Instead he resembles the character of many of his paintings, the sleeping man in the comfortable dressing-gown who points towards the road and the racing-car: in a dream. The painter of the Mastra Rua is a man who reads stories of inner journeys, adventures, like those of his paintings, even as his own elected places are the walk along the city’s marina or a garden from which he can just make out the sea. If he drives, it is to grasp the landscape. His paintings stop short of the physical journey, preferring instead to reach for the emblem and enjoy it sensually in the confines of shapes and colours arrived at in his studio.
The world is revealed in the picture: to you, the spectator who, now it is accomplished, may regard the very essence of relationships which envelop mystery or conceal fear, amazement, longing… Then you don’t any longer know whether these relationships belong to the artist or to yourself. The painter says that his picture, each of his pictures, is a navigation: perhaps in this way it is like a book, whether one reads or writes it, as the discovery is made in the process. When he approaches his easel, Tranchino does not know beforehand what his picture is going to be, discovering and inventing it step by step, as if it were, precisely, a journey.
Translated by Pat Boran
Ferdinando SCIANNA
A WORLD “AS IT COULD BE”
Very rarely, in my opinion, do we straight away articulate a critical response to the work of an artist. Unless of course one is a professional critic. Usually we react emotionally, with pleasure, with indifference, sometimes perhaps with irritation. More seldom still do we begin to rationalise if the work is that of a friend.
Gaetano Tranchino is an extraordinary artist and he is also my good friend. He, however, lives in Siracusa while I live in Milan. I see his pictures in his studio when I go to visit him, and sometimes, between one visit and the next, whole months have passed. Looking at the pictures is, for me, part of a ritual of friendship, charged with emotion, with feelings that form an important part of our mutual understanding, as people who have known each other a long time. Certainly I am not concerned on these occasions with formulating a critical response to his work. This response will develop afterwards, gradually, perhaps suggested by something I’ve read, with which the pictures apparently have nothing in common, in the course of subsequent conversations about our individual work or about things that have more to do with life than with the arts of painting and photography.
About Giorgio de Chirico, whom he admired very much, Renè Magritte has written that his revolution consisted of the fact that “breaking with all that had been done up to that moment, he started to paint the world not as it is, nor as he saw it, but as it could be, as it should be.” To me this seems an extraordinary, lucid compliment. When I read this judgement, immediately I felt that this sentence corresponded more than any critically elaborated thought of my own to the sentiments that arise within me when I stand in front of Gaetano Tranchino’s painting.
Tranchino too creates images of a world “as it could be, as it should be”.
What I’m trying to say, to understand first of all for myself, is that I don’t think the three criteria of imagination, dream and vision are alone enough to explain Tranchino’s paintings — and maybe it would be no use. My strongest feeling, and one I find renewed with each viewing, especially of the most recent phase of his work, is that of finding myself in front of images of persuasive truth, representations of a world which seems all the more real for being made up of unreal images. A world, in fact, not dreamt, not the result of imagination, or artistic vision as we might say. On the contrary, a world that imposes itself as it should be, with the existence that it could have.
Tranchino is deeply rooted on his island, in fact on Ortigia, the island off the island. Nevertheless, maybe it is because of this virtual taking root that the world he describes to us is universal. His cultural dialogue is not, for that matter, particularly Sicilian.
Certainly, if you know Gaetano, you can find evidence in these images pointing to several elements of his personal life, of his being both timelessly Siracusan, of Siracusa timelessness.
The cars, the familiar now stormy now becalmed sea, sometimes surrounding peninsulas, tables, wardrobes. These wardrobes are armed with mirrors that often reflect images different to what stands in front of them. Pieces of archaeology, columns, huge ships from which flourish smoke made of stone, gardens in the middle of which sit men who read, write, who seem to be listening to music, small dogs, the slender figures of girls appearing and disappearing between the palms.
Fragments of real experience, certainly, which belong to Tranchino’s own memory but of which we have the impression that they have emerged from the consciousness of the painter to head off on their own and unexpectedly compose a whole new world, different and autonomous, a world with its own time and space, a world of unknown geographies, with shapes and colours never seen and obeying other laws of rest and motion. This world, this universe conjured by the painter — who, we might say, is the only one to have the right to see it, living inside of it — represented, reaffirming its own reality through the mystery of the painting in order that we, too, can get to know its existence, to enjoy its necessary beauty.
Once encountered, this universe reveals itself unambiguously. We recognise for ever after these images as, unmistakable, the paintings of Gaetano Tranchino. Perhaps this is the mystery of painting and style, difficult and often ambiguous words which here seem to prove themselves.
A precise, poetic universe which, through an artist, finds the exact form of its existence, in order to enter into and become a part of our lives.
Translated by Pat Boran
Aidan DUNNE
REVIEW OF THE PLACE OF MEMORY BY GAETANO TRANCHINO AT RUA/RED IN TALLAGHT
(The Irish Times, May 5, 2010)
Gaetano Tranchino’s paintings in The Place of Memory at RUA Red Gallery in Tallaght, have a dreamy, magical quality to them. They are pictorial fables, opening up a narrative space that is warm and nostalgic without being at all overly sweet. There is a distinctly Mediterranean feeling to the world they evoke, which is hardly surprising given that Tranchino is from Syracuse on the south-eastern coast of Sicily, a place steeped in classical history.
In his work it’s a beautiful realm. Recurrent motifs include the lush, well tended garden, the comfortable, accommodating house, remnants of antiquity in the form of stone carvings or pillars, the road and the gate, the sea and the land. All of these elements frame accounts of arrivals and departures, via bicycle, car and sailing boat or liner. Our view of events is usually oblique and fragmentary: we glimpse a bicycle rounding a corner, the hind quarters of a dog, its tail wagging, a car making its way through the night, a ship pulling away from the dock. A man stands, hands in pockets, looking into the evening light, as though awaiting someone.
The curvilinear shapes suggest travel. Most of what we see, including ships and cars, has a retrospective look. The work invites comparison with that of Simon English, who seems to share many of Tranchino’s concerns. But while English likes drastically toned down colours and modulated shades of grey, Tranchino embraces colour with all the verve of David Hockney.
He uses intense yellows, pinks, reds, greens and blues in richly textured, jewel-like masses, often accentuated by strong tonal contrasts. If he wasn’t such a good painter it could all go horribly wrong, but he is actually a fine, sensitive painter, and the paintings are not only attractive but capable of withstanding sustained attention: they’d be good to live with, in other words. Tranchino’s place of memory is tinged with the sadness of loss, but as formulated, it’s an almost pleasurable sadness.
Pat BORAN
THE PLACE OF MEMORY
All true art is a kind of haunting, first for the artist, then for its wider audience. Like the writer who returns to the empty page, the painter who faces the blank canvas, day after day and year after year, inevitably finds that the process of filling that space—or of carefully brushing away the obscuring dust, as might be more appropriate description, given the archaeologically rich Sicilian landscape—reveals images that echo and amplify each other across great stretches of time.
Gaetano Tranchino’s paintings, though they appear to record or replay specific personal moments and events from the past cannot be called nostalgic or even merely personal, for the moments they describe—the recent departure of a girl, or man, or dog, the arrival of yet another smoke-scarfed ship into port—may be said to be as old as life on the Mediterranean island itself. The artist who goes after personal emotions, it would seem, is soon confronted with eternal questions and truths.
For Tranchino, unlike many artists of his generation, the haunting at the heart of his work is connected with the persistence of love, of affection, of mystery and of memory itself. In this sense, and on that often deeply troubled island, his work is celebratory, poetic and ultimately life affirming. The vibrant colours and sensuous forms, the inviting perspective and humanizing presences of his trade-mark figures (the reader, the thinker, the dog-walker, the dreamer) all suggest an enviable and all-too-rare contentment.
Though he might laugh at the notion, there is in his work if not quite a religious impulse then certainly a ‘sacredizing’ one, an impulse which makes something special and numinous of an old gateway, of the palm tree leaning over it, of a half-eroded Doric column on a hillside or the tree-lined pier which reaches out to protect an approaching ship.
For a painter who is so often drawn to modes of travel (1950s automobiles, almost comically primitive aeroplanes, etc), Tranchino’s work itself might be said to be a kind of time travel. The hillsides of south-eastern Sicily, dotted with Greek, Roman and Baroque ruins make almost impossible a simple chronological reading of the landscape. Rather than ask the question ‘Who has been here?’ it might be simpler to ask ‘Who has not?’
To paint in Sicily, then, is to be aware of the fleeting nature of time, the rise and fall of so many empires, and, paradoxically, of the enduring power of art to place a single gesture or brushstroke before the eyes of generations. To paint in Sicily is to work with a pallet of colours few northern Europeans may wield with the same casual confidence, or the same mediated feeling.
At once haunting and life affirming, Gaetano Tranchino’s paintings are also undoubtedly beautiful. One is put in mind of Sicily’s most famous modern writer, the late Leonardo Sciascia (a close friend, as it happens), who in a well-known short story* has one of his characters praise the Sicilian landscape for “a beauty so obvious that it would dazzle even an idiot”. The same can be said with confidence of Tranchino’s work which makes even those who have never been to his homeland wish to go there again.
*from the short story ‘The Wine-Dark Sea’