Red column, sonovasoro and koi Sergio Risaliti

A work by Marco Bagnoli in Garrison

Once again this year, the site-specific Art Program conceived by Nancy Olnick and Giorgio Spanu pays homage to the soul of their property located in the woods of Garrison. A vertical element, resembling a totem, stands near a pond not far from the splendid home designed for them by the architect Alberto Campo Baeza. The house itself is a site-specific work; its elegance of proportions, rhythm and transparency provide a foil for the seasonal changes in the landscape, the variations of color and light and the horizon line marked by the bends of the Hudson River. Around the mirror-like pond, animated by Koi fish, a burst of intense green leaves and pink peach blossoms explodes in the spring. A Zen enclave, as Nancy and Giorgio describe it, in the heart of a forest inhabited by ancestral spirits, where every square centimeter could be poetically extolled by latter-day Walt Whitmans. And once again, in an approach that blends radicalism and fond predilection, Nancy Olnick and Giorgio Spanu have dedicated their Art Program to focus singularly on Italian Art. In fact, the park already features works by Mario Airò and Stefano Arienti, Massimo Bartolini and Domenico Bianchi, Bruna Esposito, Remo Salvadori and Giorgio Vigna. This group is now joined by Marco Bagnoli, who since the late 1970s has had works in international exhibitions including the Venice Biennial and Documenta in Kassel, as well as prestigious public and private collections.

As is generally known, Italians have a special, deep-seated capacity to relate to the anthropized landscape, with artfully-designed gardens and, by extension, parks, comprising sculptures, fountains, water features, grottoes, labyrinths, menageries and orangeries, as in the famous Boboli Gardens of Florence’s Palazzo Pitti, where Bagnoli recently showed a series of works and new installations. Their taste for man-nature harmonization was based on the lyrical writings of Virgil, the favorite Latin poet of Dante and Petrarch, fundamental to the re-flowering of art in the Renaissance, when the esthetic of the Italianate garden reached its zenith. Looking at Panchina, installed by Domenico Bianchi in a strategic spot on the Olnick Spanu property here in Garrison—practically a belvedere provided by nature to allow us to enjoy the spectacle of the Hudson River Valley, with its dawns and dusks so often depicted by celebrated painters like Thomas Cole and Frederic Edwin Church—I cannot help but think of a painting by Giovanni Bellini that shows Saint Francis, the father of every “penniless” artist, contemplating the landscape. Bianchi’s hieroglyph inlaid in the marble seat invites us to consider the sinuous harmonies of the cosmos, nature and the landscape, in this place so strongly characterized by the serpentine movement of the river. And so it is as well for the intertwined rings of Remo Salvadori’s Continuo Infinito Presente, which recalls the dance of the three Graces in Botticelli’s Primavera, in which each of the maidens gives and receives gifts in a circular movement, an unbroken circle suggesting the interdependence between earthly and celestial time and space, between the fluvial flow of the present and the infinite cyclical duration of life in the cosmos. In both of these cases (Bianchi with his marble inlay and Salvadori, whose work intermingles with two of the park’s ancient oaks), the profound and almost unconscious relationship with art history is expressed not through citations of figurative elements or academic styles, but on a modernist conceptual basis, rejecting mimesis in favor of the universal communication of organic forms and geometric shapes, with which the particular virtues of the materials merge.

The miracle of Italian art is its extremely fragile beauty, more lyrical and hermetic than surreal or hyper-realistic. It is an art that pursues cosmic proportions, favors the forms and colors of the vegetation and minerals, makes use of sprezzatura or studied carelessness, transforms mute material into something sensuous, feels at home with metaphysics, is as caught up in whimsy as in rigorousness. It has a mysterious quality, an unpredictable idea of beauty, perfected over centuries of artistic and literary civilization. Admiring an Italian work of art, one almost always perceives a certain sense of something melancholic and serious, ironic and wistful, that links the artist to yesterday (Leonardo) and to the present day (Mario Merz). I think that this set of values is the principal reference for the husband-and-wife duo Nancy Olnick and Giorgio Spanu, and that their choices reinforce one another, focused on this laudable circulation of intentions and ideas, sensibilities and models. In fact, the result is exciting, especially considering that here in Garrison, the environment is quite different from that of Renaissance gardens, because in this open space, dimensions are sublime and nature dominates unchallenged with a power that could easily annihilate the fragile poetry of Italian art. And yet,
it doesn’t. Quite the contrary.

In the park of the Olnick Spanu property along the Hudson River, Marco Bagnoli’s work is now installed, a four-meter-high talisman column painted Mannerist red, flanked by a large stone near the Koi pond. Atop the pilaster is a vase from the Sonovasoro series, made of fiberglass painted in a mother-of-pearl effect. This container, embellished with a sequence of spiraling marks that make it appear to rotate, works in tandem with a second vase of identical size and shape, set on a subtly-shaped boulder on the ground. The stone, in fact, resembles the palm of a cupped hand, ready to offer or accept something precious or extremely fragile. Thus the vertically erect red column dialogues with the horizontally-oriented rough stone at the edge of the pond. The second Sonovasoro is made of white marble, and holds a reflective copper parabola-shaped dish. The column is planted deep in the ground, ideally expressing a link to the center of the planet. The intense, gold-tinged red stands out against the green landscape, rising towards the sky, contrasts with the white of snow in winter and lights up amid bare late-autumn branches. The vases collect rain, snow, falling leaves and drifting pollen. Insects and butterflies alight in them. The fiberglass is pierced by the sun’s rays on clear days, but seems to disappear in autumnal mist, and over the course of the month shines and dims at night with the moon’s waxing and waning. A golden sound—hence the title Sonovasoro—bounces from one container to the other like notes dripping from a fountain, from the zone of spirits to the earth and back. In the title applied to the pair of vases, the term “sono”, referring to sound, is also, in Italian, the first form of the verb “to be”: io sono, I am. Thus the vase is a body and an individual being. Now, since there are two vases in the Garrison installation, we must deduce that the “I” is also the Other. So, sound joins and binds the pair to a single earthy and celestial fate. Male and female compose a single melody, an androgynous, plastic and sonorous form. Thus, for Bagnoli, the meaning might be: “I am the Other,” or IOXTE, I x YOU. Hearkening back to the French poet Arthur Rimbaud’s famous declaration “J’est un autre,” but here with a shift or an evolution from the psychology of symbolism to the hermetic and alchemical mystical union of opposites. As the term “oro”—gold—suggests in Sonovasoro.

Marco Bagnoli has experimented with the Column for many years. There are several versions of various heights, in always-different materials, patinas and colors. The red color is a solidification of the red band, a geometric figure of divine proportions that has become a recurrent element in Bagnoli’s work over the past few decades. One of his Columns was presented a few years ago in the garden of Florence’s Palazzo Medici Riccardi, a temple of Renaissance culture where Cosimo the Elder and Lorenzo the Magnificent lived. Designed by the great architect Michelozzo, this splendid palazzo was frequented by personalities of the caliber of Marsilio Ficino and Poliziano, and artists like Benozzo Gozzoli and Michelangelo. As Bagnoli writes: “The red-colored band is the sign of the constancy of the plane in the flight of space into time.” It has the same transcendental function as Russian icons and Malevitch’s geometric figures. Another space-time threshold is the reflective dish. Bagnoli uses the parabolic mirror as a doorway to a higher awareness of reality, explored in a mystical and alchemical sense. These mirrored dishes enhance extra-sensory perception, provoking a broadening of the field of vision in an anti-perspective, elliptical sense, to the point of draining the reflection and liquefying the reflected. In fact, as we move towards the focus of the vision, towards the center of the circumference, our face disappears, as if we have been sucked into the parabola. In reality, as Bagnoli assserts: “it is the Face that is amplified until the focus of the object coincides with his. And there the image disappears.” This is the moment of intersection of SpazIOXTEmpo—space-multiplied-by-time—when the experience of loss and bewilderment is revealed as awareness of the Other, and through Otherness, a form of absolute awareness.

The work Colonna a Delfi (Column at Delphi) conceived for Garrison springs from an earlier project of Bagnoli’s, Fontana a Delphi, envisioned by the artist in 2000 for an open space near Delphi overlooking the sea of Corinth, a monument made up of 72 vases atop 72 columns arranged according to the geometric-symbolic order of the Quincunx—that is, an ancient, perfect arrangement used for planting fruit trees and vineyards. So, Bagnoli now intends to relate the ancient Apollonian and Dionysian sacredness of Delphi to the primordial sacredness of the forest of Garrison, a place of palpable natural and spiritual energy for which we are obliged to feel deep respect. Delphi is the location of the sacred sanctuary dedicated to Phoebus-Apollo, the god of the sun, reached by ascending the Via Sacra to the southern slopes of Mount Parnassus. Here the prophetess Pythia’s divinations were proclaimed, and the Pythian games were held every four years. The mantic session took place on the seventh day of each month, but the Pythia remained silent in the winter when Dionysius, the god of death and rebirth, supplanted Apollo. Legend has it that the mantic nature of the place was discovered by a shepherd who noticed that his goats became agitated near ravine that cleave the land near Delphi. The curious shepherd approached the crevice, and thereafter began to prophesize the future. Along the road leading to the temple of Apollo is the Castalia spring, in the waters of which the Pythia bathed before revealing her prophecies. The sanctuary also contained a navel-shaped stone (the omphalos or betilo), and was thus held by ancient legend to be the center of the earth and the spiritual center of ancient Greece. The omphalos could take the form of a pilaster or an ovoid mass, in the latter case similar to the Egg of the World.

Marco Bagnoli has always traveled along the dual paths of art and science, but the artist’s vision has filled in the gaps for the scientist, ideologically flummoxed in the face of metaphysical and transcendental sorts of revelations. Art is thus a threshold that must be crossed in order to attain an experience of Beauty that can in turn spark a desire for greater Truth. In Bagnoli’s work, the relationship with a place represents an opportunity to dialogue with the marks and beliefs of past civilizations, using as the material for each project those artistic, philosophical, scientific and spiritual experiences of which we seem to have forgotten the grandness and the importance. Bagnoli often cites Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola. In mid-15th-century philosophical treatises, he finds the words to express his artistic vision, the surpassing of science through transcendental intuition and love of beauty, the need for religious syncretism as a base on which to construct a world free from conflict and desperation. His syncretism is not bogged down in references to obsolete or already-museified images and styles, but feeds on exploration of and curiosity about singular or precious forms and materials, following eccentric trajectories that bring him into constant contact with both Western and non-Western symbolism and mythologies. In his work, it is not unusual to see juxtaposed figures and legends from ancient Persia and the Veda, Greek myths and Renaissance hermeticism, sacred science and contemporary epistemology.

With his works and installations, Bagnoli asks us to activate our inner vision in order to absorb the non-transient essence of visible forms. This means pushing the viewer of art to the farthest limits of vision, beyond the intelligible and the perceptible and towards a transcendental intuition. Little by little, the categories of space and time are emptied of meaning, as are those of finite and infinite, or past, present and future. Looking means taking a leap of imagination, in which the beauty of a shape, or a precious material (alabaster, bronze, gold, ceramic) becomes nothing but a reflection, a datum to be sublimated. Our gaze soars high and into the void through an exercise of ascension that does not eschew the contemplation of physical beauty, but in fact recognizes its essential motivation—the fact that the love of beauty is an instrument and a vector—yet does not linger on it, recognizing it as shadow and illusion. “The work of art,” Bagnoli asserts, “is always a miracle, because it occurs in the world and for the world, and is made in spite of what exists in the world—wars, pestilence, persecutions, invasions, intolerance, rivalry, museums, the annoyance of insects, heat and drought, cold, the art market and art critics, tyranny, patrons, pop art, performance, isms, plagiarism, greatness and misery. The work of art happens in a void, and in its happening, in it excess, offers itself, and becomes agape; gathering within it the world in the void of its representation, it fills up the world. In making it, the artist abandons himself to the work and the work abandons him.” These words perhaps best express the symbolic and spiritual function of the Colonna a Delfi installation in the forest of Garrison. In fact, the vases clearly represent this act of giving, receiving and abandoning. Human beings should always remember that they are like vases, vessels that receive and that, in order to be complete, must continually pour out what they have internalized so as to be filled with everything, and above all allow the Self to be emptied out. The fact that the installation conceived by Bagnoli is made up of two vases, a column and a primordial stone is of great importance if we link it back to the origin of its commissioners: the union of male and female, Italian culture and American culture, Nancy and Giorgio’s story.

Transporting and installing a column in a sublimely beautiful forest along the Hudson River a short distance from New York City has other meanings. In fact, we should note a very important precedent: the presentation of three exemplars of Constantin Brancusi’s Endless Column at the Brummer Gallery in New York in November 1933. Two of these three wood sculptures were trimmed down by Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Brummer, who cut a few centimeters off the tops of the rhomboidal pilasters to make them fit between the floor and ceiling. Sources tell us that, once back in Paris, the two shortened Columns were further modified by Brancusi, who did not approve of their new proportions, given that Duchamp had cut them down for purely practical reasons, without considering the geometric modularity of the structure. A divine modularity which for Brancusi, a Carpathian peasant, also had a symbolic meaning and a spiritual function drawing on a great and ancient tradition. Divesting Brancusi’s works of their deep connection to spirituality and Romanian popular tradition, sacred science, archaic mythologies and folklore, transformed them into “specific objects,” from a minimalist and formalist perspective. Contradicting what Brancusi himself repeatedly said in explaining his own artistic work: “I wanted to open a humble satellite of Tisana in Impasse Ronsin”. According to Mircea Eliade, Brancusi’s Endless column clearly suggests the outline of the Column of the sky that “holds up the celestial roof,” a prehistoric myth widely diffused in various places around the world. This column also coincides with the Axis Mundi, of which there are numerous variations, such as the Cosmic Tree, the cosmic pilasters of northern Asia and the central Mountain. The Column of the sky facilitates communication between earth and heaven, and communication with higher powers is possible from the spot in which it is planted. For Brancusi, according to Mircea Eliad and Jonel Jianou, the Endless column had a transcendental, ascensional, mystical function: it was a vector of imagination thrusting towards infinite space. But here we must bring in a bit more information: in 1920 Brancusi created a Endless column from a tree in a garden belonging to Edward Steichen in Voulangis near Paris. This wooden pilaster measured seven meters and was made up of nine rhomboid modules and two half-rhomboids at the top and base. When Steichen left for America in 1927, Brancusi had the column laid down gently on the ground, managing to split it into two sections. One of the two resulting columns was then presented at the Brummer Gallery, as we mentioned above, for the 1933 exhibition organized by Duchamp. America meant a great deal to Constantin Brancusi. In fact, the sculptor had the idea for a monument of extraordinary dimensions in Central Park as early as 1926: a column that would have been three times taller than the obelisk of the Washington Monument, in proportion to New York’s skyscrapers, and would have been inhabited by entire families, while a gigantic version of the artist’s Bird in space would have stood atop it. Towards the end of his life, Brancusi seriously intended to create a similar work in Chicago, encouraged in the endeavor by well-known art collector Barnet Hodes. On March 20th, 1956, a report even appeared in the Chicago Daily News: the Column would have been 152 meters tall. On June 6th, Brancusi wrote Barnet Hodes an enthusiastic letter announcing that the preparatory drawings were ready and that the stainless-steel sculpture could have reached 400 meters. A few months later, the great, venerable Romanian sculptor died in Paris, in his studio in impasse Ronsin. Finally, we cannot help but notice an appreciable resemblance between the set-up of Bagnoli’s work in Garrison—where the red Column is surmounted by a mother-of-pearl colored vase—and certain mobile juxtapositions of Brancusi’s works which in many cases, as photographs conserved at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris show, used a Endless column as a base for other sculptures. In particular, for a study for Bird in space, for a group entitled L’enfant au monde and for a Cup called Socrates.

This latter case is very significant for us, and it is quite exciting to discern something that recalls it in the Bagnoli’s work installed on the estate in Garrison. In conclusion, we can suggest an even earlier precedent, for both Brancusi’s Enfant au monde and Bagnoli’s Colonna a Delfi. In the Baptism painted between 1445 and 1460 and conserved at the National Gallery in London, the figure of John the Baptist, son of Elisabeth, stands alongside that of the Prophet of Nazareth, the focal point of the painting. The Precursor is pouring transparent waters from the River Jordan over the head of Mary’s only son from a bowl. Next to them is a tree, perhaps symbolizing the Tree of Life. Look at the mirror of water reflecting the sky, the tree trunk with its green crown, the figure of Joshua like a column of the sky and an axis mundi, the landscape with the river flowing towards the horizon: too many elements in common to be mere coincidence. But what is missing are the Koi, an extremely important detail that makes all the difference. 

–Sergio Risaliti
Garrison, September 2013