The basic idea of metaphysical painting seems to be: that everything is in order (from a pictorial point of view) as long as it is incongruous or disturbing (to the eye and thought). Or even: we disarticulate without dismantling, we create another reality (of the mind, of the unconscious) that places us in front of a mirror which, while postponing the right proportions, communicates to us a reality that is both true and non-existent. That is, again, the unknowable “portrait” of the enigma, before us to the point of almost touching it and instead destined to remain mysterious, precisely because of its intimate essence.
Proceeding on the multifaceted channel of a painting that presumes knowledge of classicism, philosophy, literature and psychology, Metaphysics, born in four magical months of the summer of 1917 in Ferrara, has produced over time – until today – always new openings, variations, copying, reworkings, quotations and profanations, all multidisciplinary. This “journey” through time and the arts, still ongoing, is proposed, in a credible even if not always agreeable way, with the great exhibition «Metafisica/Metafisiche», curated by Vincenzo Trione, which is organized not only in the main venue of Palazzo Reale, but also in three other places: Museo del Novecento (relationship between Metafisica and Milan plus a tribute by Mimmo Paladino, entitled «Drawings for Savinio»), Grande Brera – Palazzo Citterio (interventions by William Kentridge) and Gallerie d’Italia (the images of Giorgio Morandi’s studio photographed splendidly by Gianni Berengo Gardin, who captures its soul), created in collaboration with the Electa publishing house and open until 21 June.
It all began, as is well known, in the “Villa Seminario” psychiatric hospital in Ferrara, where Giorgio De Chirico and Carlo Carrà were hospitalized (neurasthenia due to war events is, more or less, the cause). A place of suffering transformed into a creative laboratory, both because the director granted the two artists small rooms to paint, and because the visits of Alberto Savinio (i.e. Andrea De Chirico, Giorgio’s brother) and Filippo De Pisis were continuous. Here the “landscapeist” (the definition comes from Jean Cocteau) De Chirico theorizes and puts into practice Metaphysics, a quasi-movement for artists who tend to be solitary (even if they collaborate and hang out with each other), united in practice by the fear and rejection of war and in art by a reaction-revolution towards those movements, such as Futurism or the Bauhaus, which also went beyond painting. For them, however, this was and should be everything.
Cocteau also said: «De Chirico, an accurate painter, borrows from dreams the exactness of inaccuracy, the use of the true to promote the false». The great squares of Italy like the typical Ferrarese biscuits, the towers and buildings, the idealized perspectives and the silences that reach from sight to hearing change the path of art. From that moment the four painters, who were ideally joined at least for a couple of years by Giorgio Morandi (with still lifes of metaphysical imagery), created what Alberto Arbasino defined as «one of the very few intellectual conquests and dimensions of the spirit in the last two or three centuries (…) offered by the Bel Paese to the heritage of all».
Thus the exhibition at the Palazzo Reale, 400 works long, after a Stendhal syndrome-like start, with a series of masterpieces by De Chirico (self-defined «pictor optimus»), immediately followed by paintings by Savinio, Carrà, De Pisis and Morandi, unfolds on the “consequences” towards magical realism (with paintings by the first Mario Sironi and Felice Casorati), even Max Ernst, and surrealism (with works by Salvador Dalì), but also towards the contemporary (Andy Warhol, Mario Schifano and many others) and the transition to other arts: architecture, photography, design, fashion, cinema, theatre, comics, music and literature.
Not all the “openings” are convincing, but even those that appear to be forced are nevertheless solid points of support for a discussion that starts from the fundamental idea of Metaphysics, as a basic creativity left as a legacy, conscious and unconscious, of so much art that came later. The imaginative idea of ”false”, coined by Cocteau, magnificently contains myths, enigmas, rebuses, anachronisms, irtuality, irony, play, baroque, seriality, mystery, claustrophobia, restlessness, loneliness, disorientation, madness, family affections, obsessions, philosophy (just think of De Chirico’s references to his beloved Nietzsche), archaeology, sculpture, history, and more.
This is why that experience, which started with the famous “human” mannequins, crossed artistic and temporal barriers. The curator Trione is perfectly right about this, so much so that De Chirico himself, despite his constant evolution, took up and relaunched his Metaphysics several times, as we see in the works skilfully inserted at the end of the exhibition, to leave the visitor as enchanted (almost) as at the beginning. This is how those metaphysical paintings, originally born in a psychiatric hospital (I want to see it – despite its exceptional nature – not as a place of closure but of opening the mind towards different and therefore broader journeys), have become almost a symbol of inner research.
Many years later, Filippo De Pisis said: «Would I be too bold if I said that these productions could be a pretext for the good superiors to believe them to be a little mentally ill?». Not daring, if anything realistic, as Metaphysics (cannot) be.