Cantos

Square

Cantos

July 2, 2008

Like many contemporary artists from Jasper Johns to Sandow Birk, I am intrigued by Dante Alighieri’s Cantos of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell. His authority at the beginning of the Renaissance and Modern worlds helped shape many artists and writers with inspiration and structure. Each generation seems to reinvent Dante’s art to suit current aesthetics. As a reductive artist interested in modernist ideas about form and content, I come to Dante with a great love of his literature but with a highly pared-down style. My version of the Cantos is more in tune with Color Field Painting.

While living in Italy, I was captured by Dante’s narratives, but because I am a painter, I ingested them in visual terms. Because of this, and because I am equally interested in narrative and visual forms, many of my Cantos are diptychs and triptychs. I see them as linear constructions, narratives, but in the sparest of elements. Each panel contains both gesture and color, and each diptych or triptych moves from one panel to the adjacent panel subtly, much like Dante moved through his journeys.

“Its entry from that point of the horizon brought morning there and evening here; almost all of that hemisphere was white—while ours was dark—”Canto I, 43-46. Dante, Paradiso

Every substantial form, at once distinct from matter and conjoined to it, ingathers the force that is distinctly its own, a force unknown to us until it acts— it’s never shown except in its effects, just as the green boughs display the life in plants. And thus man does not know the source of his intelligence of primal notions and the lids of all those shades, as untamed hawks are landed, lest, too restless, the fly off.Canto XIII, 67-72. Dante, Purgatorio

After those ardent suns, while singing so, had wheeled three times around us, even as stars that are close to the fixed poles, they seemedto me like women who, though not released from dancing, pause in silence, listening until new notes invite to new dancing.Canto X, 76-82. Dante, Paradiso