You re-gard me
The magnetic colors nail you to the floor; the charming facial expression, the specific expression of that face in that moment (the intensity of that moment); and finally you stare at the expression in those eyes, those eye-windows, the entrance to the heart, to the inside, to the depths of unknown people who, now become ‘familiar people’: through your intuition you guess their thoughts, you understand their souls. You are surprised as you discover that you are no longer in front of the painting but inside it.
The change that I would like to see in my paintings is to make more figures, more portraits ...
It's the only thing that touches my sentiments fully, and that makes me feel ‘the Infinite’ more than anything else. I am very confident when I do portraits, knowing that this work is much more serious. Maybe that is not the exact term, but rather that which allows me to teach that which is best in me better and more serious in me [...].
With a picture I wish I could express something moving like music.
I want to paint men and women with something eternal, which was once the symbol of the halo, and that we try to make the same now with radiance, with the vibrancy of colors [...].
Ah, portraits, portraits that show the thoughts, the soul of the model: here is what I believe should be seen in a portrait.”
Vincent Van Gogh, Arles, 3rd of September 1888
What happens when you stand in front of the faces painted by Lara Leonardi? You just “stand”. You stand. It may surprise you that you cannot just run off from painting to painting in a rush. The magnetic colors nail you to the floor; the charming facial expression, the specific expression of that face in that moment (the intensity of that moment); and finally you stare at the expression in those eyes, those eye-windows, the entrance to the heart, to the inside, to the depths of unknown people who, now become ‘familiar people’: through your intuition you guess their thoughts, you understand their souls. You are surprised as you discover that you are no longer in front of the painting but inside it.
The subjects are known people, with a name, known either by intuition or explicitly expressed in the title of the portrait: Angelina, John, Julian, Erasmus, Serena, Catherine Lara, Emma ... but people, not individuals, not atoms, but people, well identified persons (words that match exactly, in Latin and Greek to define a being, of course an indivisible being, yet “divided” from others: and ultimately lonely as a stray dog).
Person is the mask in the Latin Theater that, while hiding the face of the actor, reveals its role in the drama; a big mouth-mask with a megaphone as in SONAT, resonance re-sonance (per-SONAT = per-SONALITY) voice. Person: a word from the theatrical lexicon, which finds its way into Christian Theology.
Indicating the three persons of the Trinity, the communion of the Trinity: Christ veils and reveals the Father's face. “Whoever sees me sees the Father” (John 14.9). The merciful Father: is what Magdalene saw in the eyes of that young man named Jesus.
This is how “Il timor di Dio - The Fear of God”: was born in her, not the fear of the Rex tremendae maiestatis, a cold accounting of the many sins that has passed, but the fear of love - full of gratitude to “The One who willingly forgives” as Dante says in “Il timor di Dio - The Fear of God”, we do not see Jesus, but we “feel” him through the eyes of Mary Magdalene, so vividly magnetized by him, that they appear to be - literally exorbitant.
What happened two thousand years ago, happens again throughout history up to now, through the work of the Holy Spirit that comes to you, that appeals to you and hurts in the faces of the personal and experiential charisma: Look at the portrait titled: “Padre e figlio - Father and Son” with a heart full of gratitude. A moving picture like music. Watch “Come Maria - As Mary”, and you understand it: in this young woman today, as in Mary when the angel Gabriel departed from her, “resulted in a deep mysterious feeling of self: a worship of self, a sense of magnitude equal only to the sense of her being nothing, a sentiment she has never entertained.” My nothingness is pardoned. My misery exalted.
It is the re-creation of the face: the person created in the image and likeness of God, therefore, the vessel of an inalienable dignity, and resulting from Mary’s “yes”.
Viewing the dramatically joyful “Caterina canta - Catherine Sings”, she sang, and now she laughs and moves silently from her bed of pain.
Returning to view “Come Maria - As Mary”, the details now remain etched in your mind; the sky blue crucifix worn on her neck, Mary’s blue robe. The cross is already written in his incarnation but there is no sense of hopelessness because Easter is the transition to the glory of heaven.
From the corner of the eye you see “Padre e figlio - Father and Son” and also as in the case of “Come Maria - As Mary”, they help you to understand “La Famiglia - The Family”. Just as two thousand years ago the comet illuminated the hut attracting - the Wise Men who worshiped the King of kings, so too, Erasmus and Serena embraced their own mysterious royally crowned prince. ‘My Boy, you're valuable! Your face resembles the Infinite.’
“La famiglia - The Family”: maybe this is not the appropriate “key word” to open the chest containing Lara’s work? There is familiarity in each face painted by Lara: the trusting intimacy generated in the flesh and regenerated in the act of being observed. And almost, as if by osmosis, it teaches the viewer how to look, how to observe.
The 1930’s. A young mother carries little Luigi to his first Mass at daybreak. The morning star rings in the blue cloudless morning. She stops and, suddenly exclaims: “How beautiful the world is and how great God is!” That woman's name was “Angelina”. Angelina Gelosa. Her son Luigi became the father of a great population. He will adopt a child: “Padre e figlio - Father and Son”. Within the embrace of these feelings, Lara accompanies her daughter Emma to school every morning and repeats almost like a short prayer: “How beautiful the world is and how great God is!” To repeat means to ask again in order to have, to possess. Lara repeats these words so frequently, and they become so familiar to her that she confides in me that “it has become painful to not repeat them.” The pain of alienation. What profound gratitude, however, surprising when we are astonished to look at things and people to discover that everything is related to the stars.
Familiarity of the real, of one and of all: the soldier and the poet, the mother and the wife, Elisa and Nicoletta, Alberto and Benedetta. Radiant men and women with something eternal, that her portraits convey through the vibrancy of their colors.
There is greatness in all of them, dignity, sacredness without an aura (Cézanne's apples come to mind): you look and it is easy to give due respect, that is, re-gard. It is an art that invites you to “cleanse your way of looking at others” it invites you to learn how to see the mysterious depth of things and people. To see what is best in others - both from the perspective of the artist, that is the painter and the subject, the model. The lesson is not moralistic but emotional. This way is worthy, convenient, it responds to our needs, and everything is more beautiful.
Lara conceives and gives birth to each work of art. She receives it as an undeserved gift, to be carried, as if in the womb, then shared immediately upon birth. I realized this upon reading her confession: “Your picture is exploding. It already lives in me and wants to come out. I beg you God, please be ready to receive it.”
Lara pulls the human face out another time and in a new way. And if it is true that the word ‘gvol (ancient Sanskrit) for face is derived from the root word gvol meaning ‘to shine’, then it is the place of Supreme Beauty of the One who has manifested the way of the truth of life – through shining. Colors.
Color-magnets, were mentioned earlier; paintings with strong color-inspired connotations with an immediate impact, and demonstrating that the words Henri Matisse wrote a hundred years ago are still valid today: “Our pictures speak immediately with beautiful blues, with bright reds, with enchanting yellows, with simple elements rummaging the human soul in its depths.” Matisse and his friends were called Fauves, beasts, because of those masses of color (campite à plat - areas covered in a color) spaces defined by sharp lines, which ferociously attack the viewer. Even in paintings carved by Lara, the colors “bite”, the brush strokes are dense and executed in pure tones, that is, they are saturated, brilliant, intense, bright and vivid. These expressionist styled colors are played out violently, and there is contrast between the complimentary and primary colors.
Matisse’s Woman with a Cap, 1905, “uses colored shadows and reflections to transform the complexion of the face to a game of shades and contrast driven by continuous invention” (Marco Vianello); Lara has also mastered this same technique as seen in “Emma al sole - Emma in the Sun”.
But while nearly all European painters of the Current Fauve-Expressionist movement moves towards the loss of the center (a must read by Hans Sedlmayr!), along a completely secular direction and particularly characterized by copying, in the sense that the icons and chromatic range are not much more than colors for the sake of colors. Lara, on the other hand, has found her center. In life just as in painting, she is intensely open to the mystery, “because all the images carry a message: further on” as Montale sang in his poetry. Portraits were a recurring theme in the works of the Expressionists: Thoughtful, reflective individuals, burdened with hopeless melancholy, that is, black humor. In Lara’s faces, “we find the holy eternal sadness that some chosen souls display. These persons would never exchange that holy eternal sadness for cheap satisfaction once they have experienced or tasted it. (F. Dostoevsky): A holy sadness paradoxically gives the faces the form of pleasant joy.
We are at the height of self-consciousness and as a result the creative experience of Lara: “La lacrima - The Tear”. Lets us identify ourselves. Lara is wearing a paint-stained shirt and it makes her look like an informal installation in constant movement. She is working on the face of that old priest. In the background, Tito Schipa is singing the world famous lyrics from L'elisir d'amore by Donizetti, “Una furtiva lagrima - A Furtive Tear”. Lara thinks of another romance, taken from Donizetti's La favorita, also sung by the vibrant voice of Tito Schipa, which, many years ago was a favorite among high school freshmen, Luigi Giussani: “Spirto gentil de’ sogni miei - Gentle Spirit of My Dreams”. The years pass and the aging priest, Don Giussani, attends the prom one evening. It’s a good party. They dine together, and then look at the young people dancing. Suddenly he stops them. «They are shocked by the interruption and I hear him tell them:
“There is a difference between you and me: as you participate in this beautiful game in this delicious movement, in this loving relationship, you have one last, terrible distraction that prevents you from being aware of a seed of sadness in this game.
When you're done, you go home, you say “Bye, see you tomorrow” and you go to your room and go to bed, then this seed- in those of you who still have a minimum of human sensibility - will feel the presence of this seed of sadness, It would be like lying in bed with a stone beneath your shoulders. This seed, which you are not aware of, is the origin of the taste of your dance and sadness that will barely emerge and then be burnt away by sleep, when you go to bed - it is a seed of melancholy, melancholy that something has not been accomplished, that something is missing.” When I heard Tito Schipa singing during my first year of high school, I had the sensation that something was missing, not something in the beautiful aria from Donizetti, but in my life. Something in my life that would not find satisfaction, support, fulfillment, or a response anywhere».
Lara, wearing her spotted coat - stops. She is still as a statue. She feels a tear that is almost unseen, trace a line on her face: This thrill is an x-ray of her soul. And…. “La lacrima - The Tear” is the old priest who had given everything gladly to Christ, has given everything to Lara. She brought in her “a worship of self, a sense of magnitude equal only to the sense of her being nothing.”
Mysterious paradox: The more I find myself begging for You, the more I joyfully realize You are present and that You are re-looking at me closely.