Ennio Zangheri’s studio, on the port canal, is flooded with a camphorated light studded with periwinkle reflections, the same that follow sailboats floating on rippling waters at sunset. Suitcases look like still lives, while the motorcycle helmet waiting for the next escape lies on the books neatly lined up on the modern shelves, and music reigns, as do the large oil canvases that show “portraits that found their author”, as the painter himself suggests, famous people from Rimini such as Federico Fellini or Sergio Zavoli, representative figures of the town’s memory or travelling companions immortalized by the brush.
Zangheri’s portrait idea was born years ago, after a suggestion given by his late friend Gianni Fabbri. Ennio decided then to give a face to those little stories that build up history, accomplishing his project in the most intimist period of the year in order to amplify the spiritual depth of this art exhibition. The event was emblematic for its author, a sort of stepping stone to sound out future itineraries, journeys into memory’s twists and turns that transform what is intimate and personal into something public and vice versa. The subjects of his paintings become life companions in a sort of geographic map of the mind, where what’s been lived comes back into the present. Looking at all these stacked canvases our eyes bring back thousand-faceted faces and light up unexpected memories.
The observation of the contemporary world through pictorial analysis turns to anthropology and sociology when he portrays “family groups at home”: mothers with their infants, swordsmen with their lance in rest, or even the classic “Bride and groom’s room” by Mantegna, which Zangheri re-interpreted in an ironic fashion, painting its rarefied faded and sanded foreshortened views to evoke centuries that he intends to disrupt by representing the summation of the eclecticism and of the magnificence of a court prone to maximum splendour. These are small jewels out of a box of acrylic and mixed colours. They display mortars in which only the pigments seem to make out a shape, while electrical radiations perform jagged edges and highlight the drawing, a double and a mask at the same time.
A mask that is like a primitive totem and hides its true nature in a sort of hall of mirrors full of ambiguity. Colours shade off into collage in a combination that rapidly engraves interpretive transpositions caught by Chagall-like strokes which don’t relent at all, and raise sensory perceptions, while the bodies clasp you to morphologies of social obscurity which sweetens the dramatic present, empties your conscience and disperses the introspective speculation on sentiment. Walls come alive with metaphors and irony while the solitude of emotional incommunicability coils man up in devilish depersonalization.
Sexual intercourse wears itself out under the spotlights, in a sort of mirage of hedonist palaeontology appearing against the light. Radiant athletic bodies hurriedly eat away the time of primordial ecstasy in a sublimation related to betrayed desire, to the material violation of the gaze fleetingly reflected in a hall of mirrors, therefore deformed, but reality is not only matter and sensual aplomb of Baconian derivation. Before their narcissistic wreck, presences talk to their doubles in a carefree, scornful and grotesque hypothesis of revenge that is connected to fetishes and phonemes, to sad words on acrylic kernels that will hound and testify, after a time of privations and physical pain, almost a liberation from an inner fire that digs deep looking for philosophical value, almost a descriptive grammar of one’s own forced state of mind.
Portrait is the term that controls many meanings in order to leave tracks that will look like maps of a tribal treasure, which interfaces with light and shoots blank while a flurry of unlike individuals pours out from bistrots, cafés and taverns in a language aiming at wild cohesions in the oppressive-expressive theatre. Senses and sensations escape to metropolitan orgasms, to a symphony of piled-up bodies, and show themselves through face wrinkles, keeping the spectator glued to the interludes and the uncertainties of the human comedy, à la Balzac, in which recognizing oneself is a destabilizing game of close-ups, of deception sequences, yet also the dimension through which you can mould with clay, colour and forge a romantic ideal capable of inventing states of mind that are engraved in an ironic and comic repudiation. In this way the absolutely photogenic tribe, rather than becoming a shop window representation, turns into sculpted body, a face reinterpreted as “saint, pirate, artist or musician” according to the verse of an old song by Georges Moustaki that often resounded through the 70s and now comes back to link us to a sense of freedom that was lost in the folds of those lives interrupted too soon, in those hours wasted with doubts impressed under Rimbaudian vamps, while salty wind blows in your eyes to glean seeds of existentialist culture.