Recalcati: Making use of de Chirico
by Gilbert Lascault
Between October and November, 1973, thirty pictures by Antonio Recalcati were on exhibit at the Galerie Mathias Fels in Paris. As Alain Jouffroy noted in his preface to the catalogue, Recalcati, repaints de Chirico. That is, into precisely structured pictures that immediately evoke the world of Giorgio de Chirico, he introduces pastries, sausages and sometimes strange female legs that resemble hams. Recalcati also unleashes his fury against the marble statue that can be seen in de Chirico paintings; he scratches and erases it making it look as fragmented as if it had been struck by a hammer.
Recalcati’s work in 1973 then consists of repainting and assimilating the pictures of de Chirico. There are many ways to interpret this, but the thirst that comes to mind is perhaps that of profanation . What is at issue is the violation of a sacred space, the forceful appropriation of a picture produced by someone else. In other words, no more artistic property; this respect of the painter overcomes the paralysing sense of veneration one is taught to feel before “works of art”. Just as Duchamp put a moustache on the Mona Lisa, so Recalcati endows the piazzas and large deserted spaces of the de Chirico with and abundance of Karma hams, salami, soup-tureens filled with chocolate, beef tongues and sandwiches. The metaphysical void is transformed into a display of food that invites one to consume.
But this profanation and desacraliztion should not be interpreted as an expression of hatred toward de Chirico nor as an attempt to destroy (even symbolically) his work. All that Recalcati seeks is the right to make use of them.
At the same time, this profanatory use of de Chirico picturescan be read as a materialist act, a defense of materialism sharply opposed to that annoying label on “metaphysical painting” often used as a pretext to write about de Chirico’s works in idealistic and theological terms. These writers see the empty squares as being haunted by a dead God, and absent Word. Recalcati turns this Word into sausage, meat, sugar. By so doing he breaks perhaps unveils one of de Chirico’s secrets, showing openly what it seems that de Chirico imagined behind the walls he painted. In effect, an amazing text by de Chirico expresses his desires that the “unawable” act of eating strawberries with cream be hidden “in the back of the darkest rooms”. A 1919 picture is also entitled Still Life with Salami .
In this way Recalcati continues and extends the work begun by de Chirico, in whose pictures he finds both a reflection of his own desires and of his pictorial preoccupations. In Recalcati’s paintings one can see a bland of cruelty and tenderness, a savage tenderness, a loving cruelty toward de Chirico, women, toward what is not known as painting and what is called reality.
From “XX Siècle”, 1974, n° 42.