Antonio Mancini
I think I might have a new favorite painter, and I don’t say that lightly.
I stumbled across this slide-show of some of Mancini’s works, and . . . I think I’m in love.
This guy paints like I wish I could, seriously. I’m particularly enamored with his older stuff before he went (more) insane. I certainly need to see some of these paintings live, but even on my computer screen, woah.
Brushwork like woah. Color and spatial composition like woah. That ephemeral sense of humanness* so absent from most paintings like woah.
Based on a few HTML pages and .jpgs, I’ve already put him up there in my Personal Pantheon with Diego Velazquez, Rembrandt, Caravaggio (the worst painter, but the deadliest sword-fighter of the lot) and Vermeer.
“After the Duel” 1872
^ This painting floors me. It has such a compelling narrative, the figure painting is immaculate, the subject is treated with so much empathy and like a lot of his works, the color and value composition is sublime.
“Self-Portrait†(circa 1880)
^ First off, I’m a portraitist at heart. I get post-modern art, and I generally like post-modern art, but I also believe two things regarding portraiture: that it is the most demanding painting task, and that portraits that allow us to empathize with the subject are the highest expression of that task.
Mancini’s paintings are full of life and heart, and seem *there* in that way that a poor-to-average portrait artist can never reproduce. But at the same time, he’s taking liberty with the painterly traditions, adding nonsensical brushwork and using expressive non-representational markmaking without ever letting go of the image’s core mission — to show us this person, and invite us to tell stories about him, or put him in our story.
Quite clearly, Mancini is also crazy, degenerating toward bona-fide bat-shit crazy as he ages.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
—–
*I bet the Japanese have a word for this concept.
February 14th, 2008 at 12:20 am
The paintings are stunning. The self-portrait reminds me of the one you did of yourself (which is the best self-portrait I’ve seen by anyone I remotely know, and I knows me a lot of people).
And hells yeah, we Japanese have several words to express lack of humanness, in all shades and colors as a matter of fact. It’s what we do best. Boo-yah! er Banzai!
[Reply]
February 14th, 2008 at 9:49 am
I was thinking of a word that expresses some innate humanness, rather than lack of it. Some sense in art that grounds it into human experience.
It’s like umami. There’s no word for Umami in English, so we always say “umami” when we want to describe that flavor. I bet in Japanese there’s a word for the human presence in art.
Just like German has “schadenfreude” and my other favorites “zeitgeist” and “gestalt.”
And after the World Cup, I now really like “mannschaft”
[Reply]