Giovanni Muro (f) -Dressing the Church : floral tributes

Giovanni Muro (1948-2009), was an Italian abstract expressionist artist, operating on the fringes of the last glimmers of the Povera Arte and Minimalist movements . By mid 1979 Giovanni’s personal arrangements had reached something of a crisis. Lacking a steady income and consequently living with his parents in their small apartment as he entered his ‘30’s, was causing endless friction, while at the same time Giulia was looking for some increased level of commitment from him. Fortunately , whether as a consequence of a growing sense of urgency on Giovanni’s part that he had to address these issues or a collateral consequence of his increased local profile, but that Summer Giovanni secured a part-time student liaison role at the Fonseca University for the forthcoming academic year. While this was not exactly what he would have hoped for, was poorly paid and committed him to Venice , it also bought him time and enabled him and Giulia to find their own rented apartment up near the Chiesa San Giobbe . This was not an ideal location from Giulia’s point of view, as her work for Fortuny was based at their Guidecca factory site rather than the Palazzo. However, the area was affordable and was also close to the railway station, which was helpful as Giulia’s work as a junior fabric researcher and conservator for the Fortuny involved her in an increasing amount of travel , tracking down historically significant dresses and prints, particularly early examples of the pleated “Delphos” design. It was on one such trip to Paris in November of 1979 to visit the home of a now aged French film actress, who owned an enviable range of the Delphos dresses from the ‘20’s and 30’s , but who had not been seen in them for many years, that Giulia managed to find an hour to visit a bookshop in order to acquire a Christmas present for Giovanni . Leaving the shop Giulia had in her bag two recently published works that she was confident would appeal to Giovanni: Michelle Verrier’s 1978 colour illustrated guide to the paintings of Henri Fantin- Latour, published by Harmony, and the first French edition of “Kodachrome” by Luigi Ghirri, published by Contrejour, again in 1978, soon after Ghirri had been featured at that year’s Venice Biennale (that Giulia and Giovanni had visited ). Indeed , a couple of the prints displayed at the Biennale were now featured in the book.The French edition that Giulia had bought was based upon the limited run first edition of Kodachrome published in Italy by Punto e Virgola ( a venture that Ghirri had recently set up with his friends Paola Bargonzoni and Giovanni Chieramonte ( and that the latter would later take over)). While waiting at the airport and having checked her notes on the dresses that she had seen ( one of which she had with her for repair and cataloguing due to its uniqueness and fragile condition ), Giulia had time to survey her purchases. On balance her initial view of the Fantin-Latour from the Verrier survey was that it re-enforced her sense of his fecundity, with his use of colour and overt paint strokes , albeit within the strict genre-defined disciplines of the atemporal realm of the flower-bowl still-life , having the paradoxical effect to her eyes of leaving the world of illustrative realism behind, seducing the viewer away from the world of the displayed subject , and to give him or her instead the time and space for the consideration of painting as a human act , as complex as a kiss. In contrast , having made her way through the introductory essay by Piero Berengo Gardin and Ghirri’s own prologue, it seemed to Giulia that Ghirri’s Kodachrome , for all the brio and flashes of irony and satire, and the occasional truly arresting image, ultimately amounted to an avoidance of difficulty and a celebration of the banal. Certainly the Ghirri book did nothing to change her initial, negative views of his work from the Biennale . Admittedly she recognised from the book that the Kodachrome slide, either as a tool to record, say, the condition of a sleeve hem, or as an aide to societal and family memorialisation, was an empowering and democratising invention ( albeit less potentially transgressive than the Polaroid ), while it’s saturated colour gave a welcome intensity to the depicted scene . But , in Giulia’s view , surely what was needed was a good , practical guide to making more of this resource, not a work the principle aim of which seemed to be to try and make Ghirri an “auteur” from the transitory efforts of a well- travelled, observant, self- believing, mildly quirky, early adopter, too prone to the “eclatante” . Despite these doubts ,given the expense and lack of time that she had to find something “better”, Giulia settled on giving these two books to Giovanni as planned, nevertheless anticipating that it would result in inevitable disagreement between them. As anticipated , over that Christmas and New Year Giovanni and Giulia, along with some of their friends hammered this out. Initially Giovanni was exceptionally defensive on behalf of Ghirri, arguing that what Ghirri’s work offered the reader was a “way of seeing” and that that was far more useful and powerful than any manual or technical guide. But in time Giovanni came to acknowledge that the more one looked at Ghirri’s images , despite the playful cleverness of some of the plates and occasionally arresting observation of both subject and colour tone, there was something missing at the heart of the work , something that the single mindedness of ,say, Fantin-Latour’s work possessed. In any event , any defence of Ghirri’s editorial selection and artistic point of view had to somehow take into account his justification , if not manifesto, from the third and final section of his self-penned introductory preface ( just before the “biography”, that , curiously, did not refer to his earlier work as part of Guerzoni’s “Affreschi” project published in 1972): “The daily encounter with reality , the fictions, the surrogates, the ambiguous, poetic or alienating aspects, all seem to preclude any way out of the labyrinth, the walls of which are ever more illusory...to the point at which we might merge with them...The meaning that I am trying to render through my work is a verification of how it is still possible to desire and face a path of knowledge, to be able finally to distinguish the precise identity of man,things, life, from the image of man, things and life.” It seemed to even Giovanni that these words were embarrassingly adrift , avoiding both the universally experienced pressure of competing , ever-shifting and radical ideologies that bore down mercilessly upon both “things” and “life”and also the all-pervasive contingency and uncertainties of experience. It was not that the prints ignored either the ideological or, at a certain level, the political, but all such forces seemed secondary to the wit and whimsy of the ironising aperture , while the organisation of the work into broad but far from comprehensive categories of experience and situation , undermined the work’s claim to universality in favour of a pervasive sense of a happy go lucky opportunism and a judicious re- packaging of those of Ghiri’s recent trips and experiences that he was prepared to share. Ghirri might have been right when he said that what an image showed was no more important than what was cropped out or omitted from it (“ ...the deletion of the space that surrounds the framed portion is as important for me as what is represented: it is thanks to this deletion that the image takes on meaning , becoming measurable”), but when the latter included , by way of example, the subjects of birth, sex, death and faith then all but the most technically- obsessed viewer could be forgiven for sensing a lack of substance in what was being “verified”. As Giulia noted ,to Giovanni’s evident discomfort, when they yet again turned to the subject late one evening in early January 1980 (and leaning on her almost daily negotiation between art and commerce through her work for Fortuny), save where a photographer can capture the singular and significant , making him or her a witness, in many ways it is the use of repetition within a genre, aping the industrialised homogeneity of so much of what we do and have done to us , that achieves freedom , expression and substance, while the diffuse pluralism of endless “snaps”, exchanges the power that constraint can express in favour of an initially joyous but ultimately impotent expansiveness. This was a debate that was not to be resolved as framed, but it might have led to Muro’s next series that he worked on into the Spring of 1980, called “ Dressing the Church: floral tributes ”, which used repetition to make the point that despite all of a church’s marble and precious objects, it is not the sanctuary light that signifies that faith still resides in these ancient rooms but the presence of these always in bloom flowers. But as Giulia noted, the way that Giovanni celebrated these flowers within their functional context, rather than in the indeterminate , abstracted backgrounds characteristic of Fantin-Latour, was perhaps more reminiscent of Matisse’s approach to the subject. Indeed Giulia noted the weirdly similar arrays captured by both Giovanni and by Matisse, although as one of their very good friends observed this could be nothing more than a coincidence. For his part Giovanni , had ever-growing doubts about the direction that his work had taken. Far from claiming any lineage from Fantin-Latour, let alone Matisse, Muro feared that in an attempt to manifest the “ideological in the image” ,he had taken a step too close to photo-journalism and the world of Gianni Berengo Gardin , Ferdinando Scianna and Magnum . This anxiety was not without substance for, in a moment informed of a concern that continually gripped him , that being unknown his work lacked purpose, Giovanni had agreed to a number of his Church Flowers images being used to illustrate an article in a local people's paper on "il lavaro di sacristans di Venezia" . However in one of those strange twists of fate it was through this association that Giovanni was to be asked to contribute to an exhibition being sponsored by the same paper , that was intended to be a gathering together of "responses" to the Academia Museum , a project that resulted in his 'Christ is Dead' series. This board shows some of Muro’s series, along with a couple of contextual images relating to Ghirri, Fantin-Latour and Matisse. As a postscript and a partial aside, maybe it is a coincidence but when in 1983 the English band New Order released their second album following the death of Ian Curtis (see Giovanni Muro (h)), called “Power, Corruption, Lies” , it starkly featured a Fantin-Latour painting on the cover .