HANAMI. ANTONIO SANNINO IS THE MIRACLE OF REFLOWERING
Meanwhile, “flowers” are a direct and available phenomenon of nature, symbols of rebirth, surely, but ephemeral nonetheless. Their inherent finiteness and stubborn transience, and yet their recurrence despite everything, celebrate the ambivalence of existence and the flow of time, which is cyclical for some things and unidirectional for others. Flowers rebloom every year with the same joyous intensity and youthfulness, whereas we are fated to age. Flowers die many times and are reborn; we are born and die only once. Looking at painting from an aesthetic (and not conceptual) point of view, we can consider that Sannino does something that fully falls within the ancient tradition: he reproduces something in order to remember it and preserve it in time. According to Pliny, this is how painting was born, from an act of love: the potter Butades’s daughter traced the outline of the shadow produced by her beloved’s profile the day before he went away. In effect, painting is none other than that – a loving remembrance, or a pitiful revealing. Sannino holds to this twofold quality: by depicting the cherry blossoms and recalling them, he preserves them from the annihilation of time, from their nullification, while at the same time making them visible, manifesting their emblematic beauty. He does not mummify them or place them in formaldehyde because the artist’s goal is not to preserve reality in itself; an artist does not embalm bodies or flowers but rather makes metaphors of them – or, when successful, even symbols. It is here that the artists’ style intervenes, necessarily linked to the period in which they live, because otherwise the first still life would have been sufficient to embody all the others. And yet, each generation insists on seeking the most useful formal solution to signify the same thing, since there is always something to watch or, as Rilke wrote, Es gibt immer Zuschaun. It seems that Sannino was inspired by the flat perspective of Japanese painting, but he intensified it with such a tight close-up that no space is left on the large aluminium support for anything other than the pinkish-white, deep pink, almost purple colour of the petals. The blue branches seem like rivers, or like arteries criss-crossing an immense red surface, conveying a pasty fluid and stimulating the petals. It is as if the artist’s point of view on the cherry trees was not, as one would expect, from below or in front, but rather from above, so that we find ourselves before an aerial view of a portion of forest, a sort of geographic map. This visual displacement creates additional power in a series of works that go beyond the latest pictorial efforts of Damien Hirst – likewise dedicated to Cherry Blossoms, but seen in the usual perspective, which gives them an inevitable sense of déjà vu, things already seen but less successful than so many of their predecessors in the history of modern art (Van Gogh’s Almond Blossom, to name but one). Sannino’s poetics, on the other hand, always involves a compression of the real in the space of the window-painting, its spectacularisation especially of colour: his seas, forests and urban views always convey this visual excitement that, unlike Hirst’s, does not feel contrived but is a true expressive necessity. In the case of the Hanami, however, there is also all the history that the Japanese term brings along with it, concerning the ability of art to create enduring metaphors. In the West, from the earliest times, it is mythology (with Persephone, goddess of spring) that informed our need to understand the world, the alternation of the seasons and the rhythms of life and death. In the East, especially in Japan, it is often poetry that makes this need manifest. Countless haiku and hokku – concise compositions of seventeen syllables – and many saigo no uta – verses of farewell for warriors condemned to ritual suicide – associate cherry blossoms with non-belonging and the impermanence of the visible, typical of Buddhist and later Zen philosophical belief that existence is merely appearance and pain, from which we can distance ourselves only by experiencing emptiness and zero. Matsuo Basho, the greatest Japanese poet of the seventeenth century, and later the Buddhist monk Ryokan, who lived at the turn of the following century, sang of rebirth, death and impermanence through the metaphor of cherry blossoms and flowers in general. “Slowly / like snow / falling from the sky / so fall too / the cherry blossoms”; “This world / like an echo / reverberates / then vanishes / in the air”; “Like writing / numbers on water / it is vanity / to trust one’s heart / blindly”; “All the world / is transient / and every being / meets / its death”. “Every meeting is a separation,” wrote Ryokan – our separation from the world and from things. Ultimately, however, the enduring word in which we place unchanging faith shines brightly; the painting remains to deliver life from death. Sannino somehow captures the miracle of reflowering through art, as the great Arakida Moritake, author of the famed collection 1000 haikai, wrote in the sixteenth century, “The fallen blossom / flies back to its branch: / a butterfly.”
I do not want to linger on the question of hanami, literally “flower watching”, the Japanese term referring to the custom of wandering in places where the spring cherry trees have their most intense and magnificent flowering, chosen by Antonio Sannino himself as the title for this latest monograph. Indeed, much of the monograph, from the cover to a large later section, deals with Sannino’s work devoted to the theme of the sakura. Clearly, hanami evokes a multitude of enduring metaphors of the philosophy of the East yet it is rooted in our own culture as well. First of all, let’s consider what “watching” implies. As if the world were a show, we have the duty to watch it, a duty that the painter embraces with greater awareness than others. Painting, before all else, is a way of watching, even when it is abstract or when what is being watched is inside of us. It is only through sight, which is watching intensified by reason, that beauty appears to us.
HANAMI. ANTONIO SANNINO IS THE MIRACLE OF REFLOWERING
Meanwhile, “flowers” are a direct and available phenomenon of nature, symbols of rebirth, surely, but ephemeral nonetheless. Their inherent finiteness and stubborn transience, and yet their recurrence despite everything, celebrate the ambivalence of existence and the flow of time, which is cyclical for some things and unidirectional for others. Flowers rebloom every year with the same joyous intensity and youthfulness, whereas we are fated to age. Flowers die many times and are reborn; we are born and die only once. Looking at painting from an aesthetic (and not conceptual) point of view, we can consider that Sannino does something that fully falls within the ancient tradition: he reproduces something in order to remember it and preserve it in time. According to Pliny, this is how painting was born, from an act of love: the potter Butades’s daughter traced the outline of the shadow produced by her beloved’s profile the day before he went away. In effect, painting is none other than that – a loving remembrance, or a pitiful revealing. Sannino holds to this twofold quality: by depicting the cherry blossoms and recalling them, he preserves them from the annihilation of time, from their nullification, while at the same time making them visible, manifesting their emblematic beauty. He does not mummify them or place them in formaldehyde because the artist’s goal is not to preserve reality in itself; an artist does not embalm bodies or flowers but rather makes metaphors of them – or, when successful, even symbols. It is here that the artists’ style intervenes, necessarily linked to the period in which they live, because otherwise the first still life would have been sufficient to embody all the others. And yet, each generation insists on seeking the most useful formal solution to signify the same thing, since there is always something to watch or, as Rilke wrote, Es gibt immer Zuschaun. It seems that Sannino was inspired by the flat perspective of Japanese painting, but he intensified it with such a tight close-up that no space is left on the large aluminium support for anything other than the pinkish-white, deep pink, almost purple colour of the petals. The blue branches seem like rivers, or like arteries criss-crossing an immense red surface, conveying a pasty fluid and stimulating the petals. It is as if the artist’s point of view on the cherry trees was not, as one would expect, from below or in front, but rather from above, so that we find ourselves before an aerial view of a portion of forest, a sort of geographic map. This visual displacement creates additional power in a series of works that go beyond the latest pictorial efforts of Damien Hirst – likewise dedicated to Cherry Blossoms, but seen in the usual perspective, which gives them an inevitable sense of déjà vu, things already seen but less successful than so many of their predecessors in the history of modern art (Van Gogh’s Almond Blossom, to name but one). Sannino’s poetics, on the other hand, always involves a compression of the real in the space of the window-painting, its spectacularisation especially of colour: his seas, forests and urban views always convey this visual excitement that, unlike Hirst’s, does not feel contrived but is a true expressive necessity. In the case of the Hanami, however, there is also all the history that the Japanese term brings along with it, concerning the ability of art to create enduring metaphors. In the West, from the earliest times, it is mythology (with Persephone, goddess of spring) that informed our need to understand the world, the alternation of the seasons and the rhythms of life and death. In the East, especially in Japan, it is often poetry that makes this need manifest. Countless haiku and hokku – concise compositions of seventeen syllables – and many saigo no uta – verses of farewell for warriors condemned to ritual suicide – associate cherry blossoms with non-belonging and the impermanence of the visible, typical of Buddhist and later Zen philosophical belief that existence is merely appearance and pain, from which we can distance ourselves only by experiencing emptiness and zero. Matsuo Basho, the greatest Japanese poet of the seventeenth century, and later the Buddhist monk Ryokan, who lived at the turn of the following century, sang of rebirth, death and impermanence through the metaphor of cherry blossoms and flowers in general. “Slowly / like snow / falling from the sky / so fall too / the cherry blossoms”; “This world / like an echo / reverberates / then vanishes / in the air”; “Like writing / numbers on water / it is vanity / to trust one’s heart / blindly”; “All the world / is transient / and every being / meets / its death”. “Every meeting is a separation,” wrote Ryokan – our separation from the world and from things. Ultimately, however, the enduring word in which we place unchanging faith shines brightly; the painting remains to deliver life from death. Sannino somehow captures the miracle of reflowering through art, as the great Arakida Moritake, author of the famed collection 1000 haikai, wrote in the sixteenth century, “The fallen blossom / flies back to its branch: / a butterfly.”
I do not want to linger on the question of hanami, literally “flower watching”, the Japanese term referring to the custom of wandering in places where the spring cherry trees have their most intense and magnificent flowering, chosen by Antonio Sannino himself as the title for this latest monograph. Indeed, much of the monograph, from the cover to a large later section, deals with Sannino’s work devoted to the theme of the sakura. Clearly, hanami evokes a multitude of enduring metaphors of the philosophy of the East yet it is rooted in our own culture as well. First of all, let’s consider what “watching” implies. As if the world were a show, we have the duty to watch it, a duty that the painter embraces with greater awareness than others. Painting, before all else, is a way of watching, even when it is abstract or when what is being watched is inside of us. It is only through sight, which is watching intensified by reason, that beauty appears to us.
