Fabrizio Migliorati

The balanced and persisting solitude in the paintings of Antonio Haupala

Lonely images. Places lived by things and people who stay unknown to each other. In these places there is the opposite of a “surplus”, there is a “deficit”, something less of a presence even though a presence could be found. Solitude always recalls meditation, a certain intellectual activity or an expectation: the lonely man is one who is thinking or waiting for a trace, a call. The figure, alone, forces (her)himeself to thoughts and reflections and then, to feel his own body, to weigh his own heaviness together with his own life. There is a “minus”, presence is hardly overbearing: images pay the cost of the dynamics. A farmer with his sickle, a woman floodlit by the sunlight offers an immaculate life wraped up in motherhood., Anita plays guitar from which no sound seems to come out. The silence advises us of a necessary caution while approaching these works: voiceless works that are exciting and still relaxing. Images of everyday life, to be intended in its abounding banality and in its relationship with the deepest eschatological purposes. Everyday life is often bustling with household duties or going on an errand. A humble life. The opposite to this logic is the enterprise, that is a busy man with many things to do, to choose, tending towards new challenges and adventures. The enterprise is against the way we commonly consider everyday life, it suggests much more activity; man causes his own destiny, he does not wait (there is nothing wrong in  waiting). Haupala’s works show a daily life that is placed between the mentioned ones (everyday life-enterprise), but doesn’t join the conversation. It is a life interposed “between” and not inserted “with”. In the paintings there is both an endogenous and exogenous resistence to dialogue. These works are impossible to provoke but are deeply open: pure offering gesture. We should gently approach to these works with respect and, notwithstanding the persistent will to autopay of mankind, they hold out against any anatomy. From dialogue we pass to contemplation. Even the persons in the  paintings do resist to the inner comunication. They are not real characters but images inside the paintings without a full presence. An incomplete presence, a resistence made of stubborn and stony silence. Each represented person do not look at us and neither towards other bystanders in the picture. They don’t look at each other because each of their lives leads, together with their glances, elsewhere. The characters resist against any kind of dialogue and at  the same time they loose quietly their consistence. The “girls at the river” (ragazze al fiume) are monads, “self-referential”, standing near one another but not really friendly. Their bodies change and flesh seems to crystallize, sticking for the last time, for the very last moment. They are at the treshhold of objectivity. Painted figures are even more depicted, becoming decorations of “Chinese teapots”(teire cinesi). It doesn’t matter whether or not oriental. They are figures inside the figure, painted on the canvas and there they must stay, remaining themselves in spite of everything. Here, the lack of presence reaches his apex because presence fades away, it hardens into a porcelain teapot. All images painted by our artist have the peculiarity to move to this kind of objectivness, a “withdrawal of person”. Although, the fact of becoming objects or, better to say, the possibility of a transformation is far from being a threat. There is only the wonderful freedom to let yourself go, allowing your body to turn in something else and never to become obscene.The body flows lost, hardening or fading away by a whiff. Inspiration always belongs to the language of art and it marks preeminently its creative moment and feeling, the instant that creates the work of art. According to this purpose, a god instills a thought into someone’s mind, an affection, so he becomes a conscious translater of this power. But inspiration is also a physiological moment that consists in breathing, in acquisition of energy: a long breath that fullfills our lungs from where an explosive instant follows, the ejection, the expiration. Haupala’s works are placed at the end of this act of “inspiration”, when the body, full of oxygen, stays trembling suspended until the last moment. The breath reaches its climax, pathos is suspended. An incalculable instant that fades away when we try to keep it, to hold it up.


A free translation from Fabrizio Migliorati’s work about the exhibition of Antonio Haupala in Medole (MN), May 29, 2011

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