The Art of Akira Zakamoto
Observing a painting or a sculpture and eating a cake or a pizza are not, all in all, very different activities. There are two ways to do it. The first: not to think, to savour shapes and colours, flavours and aromas with the right half of the brain, the one that deals with emotions. The second: to use the left half, the rational one, to understand what the ingredients are, how and why they were combined and treated. The right way is the first, but the second can also be useful, provided it is not an end in itself but helps us abandon ourselves more consciously to the sensations that the succulent dish before us suggests.
And if it seems irreverent to you to compare a painting by Akira Zakamoto to an equally colourful four-seasons pizza, remember that twentieth-century art often had irreverence among its main characteristics: therefore speaking irreverently of an artist who lives astride the twentieth and twenty-first centuries seems perfectly legitimate to me. Let us discover, then, one by one, the ingredients. First: the format. Although Zakamoto does not disdain rectangular canvases, with notable frequency he uses square ones. In the exhibition Islands / The Strongholds of Dream (Rivoli 2003) there stood out an installation (so he called it, even if today the term suggests something quite different) made of twenty-four canvases of 50 by 50, titled The Future Returns, set against rare rectangular canvases. In the history of painting the square support is not the rule, but over the last hundred years there have been artists who preferred it. Kazimir Malevich, the prophet of Russian Suprematism, considered the black square 'the zero of forms' and attributed such importance to it that when he died a black square was placed at the head of his bed and another was painted on his tomb. If from the 1910s we move to the 1960s of the last century, Josef Albers's Homages to the Square are famous; Robert Ryman, the leader of Opaque Painting, painted only white squares; and Ad Reinhardt and Frank Stella too showed a marked predilection for the same form. Yet their painting was not figurative.
For those who instead want to fix a scene or a portrait on canvas, the rectangular format is almost obligatory, in the wake of the habit the camera gave us: with the fortunes of 6 x 6 film over, for decades the 24 x 36 format dominated, so that when you prepare to take a photo the first thing you think is: will the best framing be vertical or horizontal? Moving to digital cameras there was, in the absence of film, no real reason to continue with rectangles, but such was the habit that the choice was made to do so — also because the computer monitor, the television and the projector do not dream at all of giving you square images.
Zakamoto, therefore, goes against the current. It should be added that the square is a geometric figure laden with symbolic meanings: while the circle represents the sky, the square is the earth. But the discourse would take us too far. Second: the colours. The Japanese painter, or pseudo-such, does not mix them. No gradations. What is red is red, what is green is green. And since he uses enamels, which give you a uniform surface rather than one all highs and lows as oil colours do, the effect is heightened. He seems to say, with childish joy: colour is beautiful, let us enjoy it as it is; why mess it up, ruin it? But beware. The painter paints clearly recognisable forms; yet the colours are not necessarily those that nature and common sense suggest. A sky may indeed be blue, but it is by no means certain that it is; and if it is red, that does not mean it is a dawn or a sunset. The only concern is that the juxtapositions of these pure colours work: that they express what he has in mind to express. The rest does not matter: Zakamoto is as far from the obligatory use of natural colours as from the contrived search for unnatural colours for the sole purpose of astonishing.
I do not think he is convinced, like Kandinsky, that yellow seems to expand and approach, that blue contracts and recedes, that violet is sick and orange healthy; but it is undoubted that he chooses colours according to an internal, personal logic of his own, that he has created for himself a hierarchy of values and meanings (perhaps quite different from those of the Russian master) to which he rigorously adheres. The choice of colours is connected, together with much else, to the third point: the skilful use of the computer. Someone would be ashamed to admit that he uses the computer to lay down the sketch of a painting; not he. Besides, do architects not now draw on the computer everything they until recently drew by hand? Zakamoto writes: 'I use photographic images taken with a digital camera, then I produce a rough sketch by hand, with the computer I stylise the forms and choose the colours.' From the computer, moreover, come planets (including Earth and Saturn), little stars and other graphic signs. But I would point the finger at the phrase 'with the computer I stylise the forms.' Here is one way among many to seek the essential in a figure: not only does an attitude become immediately recognisable, but an emotion too is transmitted to us clearly and without possibility of misunderstanding. Goodness, emotions from a computer? Well yes: in the 21st century we cannot allow ourselves to see anything strange or unseemly in it. The method works. It should also be noted that the breaking-up of hands and faces (or parts of faces) into sharp areas of different colours, carried out by the computer, besides highlighting, as has been said, their essential characteristics, has the effect in a certain way of flattening them. If painting was for centuries, and for some still is, the feigning of three dimensions on a support that possesses only two, in Akira's human figures the third dimension ends up being symbolic, not actually represented in an attempt at trompe l'oeil as painters did for millennia, first those of ancient Rome and then the Europeans from Giotto onward.
If, instead of paintings depicting a face, Zakamoto's canvases were maps reproducing a mountainous territory, they would not be those that draw the peaks, ridges and valleys with hachures, but those that rely on contour lines: whoever uses the map well knows the meaning of the isohypses and, observing them, sees every characteristic of the relief, but to do so they have set in motion — probably without realising it — that part of the brain that is dedicated to the intelligence of symbols and not to the deciphering of images. And we are coming to the fourth ingredient of our pizza: the composition. With these human figures or their parts in the foreground, the beams of light arriving from above — from spaceships or islands floating in the ether — form a singular contrast. We all have in mind photographs in which the foreground is in focus, and therefore effectively feigns the third dimension, and the background is deliberately out of focus and therefore flat: any of us has surely used this technique more than once in portraits.
But in Zakamoto's canvases it is the foreground that turns out flat, for the reasons just given, while the beams of light (which recall those of a theatre spotlight, and therefore suggest to the observer's unconscious that this is a scene, that something is about to happen there) confer on the background a perfect three-dimensionality, worthy of the Renaissance painters and their floors of marble inlay which, converging toward the throne on which the inevitable Madonna and Child sat, had a not very different purpose. And since we are not used to a flat figure standing out before a three-dimensional background, the resulting effect is one of estrangement and slight disquiet. One might say that the true subject of the painting is not the child or the woman in the foreground, but the beam of cosmic light behind them. To the perspective suggested by the projectors hung from spaceships and space islands are added the original perspectives from top to bottom (a child's face as seen by an adult) and from bottom to top (the adult's face seen by the child). Strange to say, the solution, which may seem obvious, is anything but common: which other painters who have depicted children (there have been legions, and Zakamoto is rightly to be counted among them given the frequency of the subject in his paintings) had the idea of observing them in such a way? Mutatis mutandis, Mantegna's Dead Christ comes to mind, the most stupendous example of the application of an unusual perspective. At this point we have moved to the fifth ingredient: call it what you like, surrealism, metaphysical painting. Already the feeling of expectation, of something (but what?) that will surely happen shortly, is no novelty: it has been noted apropos of De Chirico's Italian Squares. But here and there Zakamoto goes well beyond.
Take a painting like The End of an Era: the impressive Earth with white continents and red oceans is, for a third, immersed in something blue… yes, but, goodness, in what? The sky may indeed be blue, but a planet cannot float in it as in the sea, applying Archimedes' principle! And so this Earth, red with blood, about to sink in an impossible cosmic sea, is a very close relative of the Solitary Swimmer — to stay with De Chirico — who with great strokes crosses his own room, weaving among the furniture. With a leap of era and of quality that is no small matter, we must nonetheless note that, alongside the lessons of great masters of painting, our artist kept in mind (how consciously?) the suggestions offered to him by cartoons, in particular the Japanese ones that were all the rage on TV when he was a child. Many scenes of his canvases seem frames from a cartoon: the child's face in the foreground with eyes and mouth strongly emphasised, the little stars, the spaceships… Here too, nothing scandalous and nothing new either: Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, the two greatest representatives of Pop art, began their careers drawing inspiration from comics, of which, moreover, the division of the image into sharp areas of colour, without gradations or overlaps, is typical.
But comics, cartoons, animated films are conceived — the name says so — to be drawn on paper. And here the sixth point comes into play: the support. Canvas has for centuries been the most obvious and banal of supports; it occurs to no one to notice its presence except when Lucio Fontana punctured or slashed it in search of the third dimension; but here one notices with astonishment that beneath the glossy enamels with which Zakamoto delineated his figures there is, precisely, a canvas. They would seem forms and scenes not for canvas; therefore the presence of the most classic of supports has an impact that is anything but negligible. It tells us: all right, spaceships, little stars, wide-eyed children, drowning planets… but beware, all this is not a cartoon nor a page of Tex or Mickey Mouse; it is a painting with all the proper credentials, and as such you must observe it. The emotion a painting can transmit to you is not the emotion a comic gives you, with all due respect to the latter: we are on different planes. If we connect this to what Zakamoto declares about his method of first elaborating the images on the computer, this passing, as a final act, to canvas, giving them the dignity of paintings, is in a certain way the opposite of the procedure that — in an age when no one had a PC at home — the adepts of Pop art followed: especially at the beginning they worked freehand, or with semi-artisanal techniques, trying to simulate the results given by the industrial processes used in the world of advertising. Typical is the case of Lichtenstein, who painted with a small brush through a perforated metal sheet to feign the graininess that the printing of a photo gives at the large dimensions of an advertising poster. And Warhol said: 'I want to be a machine, and I feel that when I do something… in the manner of a machine I get the result I want.' The opposite of Akira, who masterfully handles a sophisticated machine like the computers of the third millennium but… wants to be a painter. Seventh point.
Behind all the practical devices listed so far there exist theoretical convictions. One of the main ones is: we are all gods. (Incidentally, in the Gospel of John, Jesus, to silence those who accuse him of making himself the son of God, quotes a passage from the Old Testament that reads: I said: you are gods, wrong-footing his interlocutors.) Hence the idea of a performance on the occasion of which 'the visitors reappropriate their deity': Zakamoto interviews them, photographs them, elaborates the image on the computer inserting elements taken from the Internet, and turns it all into a postcard with the words 'I AM GOD,' to be put on the net on the artist's website.
That site will thus end up becoming something similar to Franco Vaccari's personal room at the 1972 Venice Biennale: visitors photographed themselves with a Polaroid and hung their image on the wall, so that by the end of the show there were thousands. Similar, but much more refined both graphically (no computer elaborations for Vaccari) and conceptually (there the visitors were simply invited to leave a trace of their passage; they were not promoted to gods). Eighth and final point. Luca Motolese was not content to change his first and last name: art history is full of painters who chose pseudonyms, and some are big names — think of Alberto Savinio. No, he even wrote himself a slightly demented Japanese autobiography, including an abduction by aliens (for otherwise how would there be so many spaceships and sidereal islands in his paintings?).
The reader half smiles, amused by this ironic mockery, and is half tempted to believe that, underneath, there is something serious: the allegory of a sudden and profound change in the artist's way of perceiving reality, due perhaps to some event no less traumatic than an abduction into space. The fact remains that the Japanese frame — to which the aforementioned cartoons are perhaps not unrelated — has its own charm; and from Italy to the Land of the Rising Sun, in the surname that changes — from Motolese to Zakamoto — the syllables MOTO fortunately remain unchanged, because it was evidently written in the stars that our man would become a motorcyclist… I began with an irreverence and I end with another: to me the pseudonym irresistibly recalls Tofusho Lamoto, the ridiculous Japanese motorcycling champion who, when I was young, featured in the advertisement for Doctor Ciccarelli's corn remover. As we have seen, what seemed an all in all simple dish (a Margherita pizza?) has instead revealed to us a number of ingredients we did not suspect. They were chosen and mixed with wisdom.
And surely the eight I have listed are not all: it is up to the reader to identify the others. They have illustrious precedents in the art history of the Twentieth Century and, in some cases, of previous centuries. This does not mean that Akira has pedantically copied others' ideas or techniques: it means that he is not a pretentious improviser, that he has solid foundations. Naturally it is not enough for there to be numerous good ingredients for a dish to turn out exquisite; but if the ingredients are few and bad, we cannot expect much… And so, are Zakamoto's paintings beautiful or ugly? If what Walter Gropius maintains is true — namely that beauty depends 'on the sure mastery of all the scientific, technical and formal requirements that constitute an organism' — they ought to be beautiful. But the question is futile. Tristan Tzara, the prophet of Dadaism, wrote that 'a work of art is never beautiful by decree of law, objectively, unanimously.' So you decide, reader, whether the square canvases of our pseudo-Japanese are to your liking.
I like them. My mother — who is the wife of a painter — does too. But at this point, if you have had the patience to follow me this far, you will understand that it is time to stop with words and to sit down at the table. 'To look at a painting one needs a chair,' Paul Klee maintained, but he did not advise also taking a knife, fork and napkin. Here, instead, the pizza is served: enjoy your meal!
And if it seems irreverent to you to compare a painting by Akira Zakamoto to an equally colourful four-seasons pizza, remember that twentieth-century art often had irreverence among its main characteristics: therefore speaking irreverently of an artist who lives astride the twentieth and twenty-first centuries seems perfectly legitimate to me. Let us discover, then, one by one, the ingredients. First: the format. Although Zakamoto does not disdain rectangular canvases, with notable frequency he uses square ones. In the exhibition Islands / The Strongholds of Dream (Rivoli 2003) there stood out an installation (so he called it, even if today the term suggests something quite different) made of twenty-four canvases of 50 by 50, titled The Future Returns, set against rare rectangular canvases. In the history of painting the square support is not the rule, but over the last hundred years there have been artists who preferred it. Kazimir Malevich, the prophet of Russian Suprematism, considered the black square 'the zero of forms' and attributed such importance to it that when he died a black square was placed at the head of his bed and another was painted on his tomb. If from the 1910s we move to the 1960s of the last century, Josef Albers's Homages to the Square are famous; Robert Ryman, the leader of Opaque Painting, painted only white squares; and Ad Reinhardt and Frank Stella too showed a marked predilection for the same form. Yet their painting was not figurative.
For those who instead want to fix a scene or a portrait on canvas, the rectangular format is almost obligatory, in the wake of the habit the camera gave us: with the fortunes of 6 x 6 film over, for decades the 24 x 36 format dominated, so that when you prepare to take a photo the first thing you think is: will the best framing be vertical or horizontal? Moving to digital cameras there was, in the absence of film, no real reason to continue with rectangles, but such was the habit that the choice was made to do so — also because the computer monitor, the television and the projector do not dream at all of giving you square images.
Zakamoto, therefore, goes against the current. It should be added that the square is a geometric figure laden with symbolic meanings: while the circle represents the sky, the square is the earth. But the discourse would take us too far. Second: the colours. The Japanese painter, or pseudo-such, does not mix them. No gradations. What is red is red, what is green is green. And since he uses enamels, which give you a uniform surface rather than one all highs and lows as oil colours do, the effect is heightened. He seems to say, with childish joy: colour is beautiful, let us enjoy it as it is; why mess it up, ruin it? But beware. The painter paints clearly recognisable forms; yet the colours are not necessarily those that nature and common sense suggest. A sky may indeed be blue, but it is by no means certain that it is; and if it is red, that does not mean it is a dawn or a sunset. The only concern is that the juxtapositions of these pure colours work: that they express what he has in mind to express. The rest does not matter: Zakamoto is as far from the obligatory use of natural colours as from the contrived search for unnatural colours for the sole purpose of astonishing.
I do not think he is convinced, like Kandinsky, that yellow seems to expand and approach, that blue contracts and recedes, that violet is sick and orange healthy; but it is undoubted that he chooses colours according to an internal, personal logic of his own, that he has created for himself a hierarchy of values and meanings (perhaps quite different from those of the Russian master) to which he rigorously adheres. The choice of colours is connected, together with much else, to the third point: the skilful use of the computer. Someone would be ashamed to admit that he uses the computer to lay down the sketch of a painting; not he. Besides, do architects not now draw on the computer everything they until recently drew by hand? Zakamoto writes: 'I use photographic images taken with a digital camera, then I produce a rough sketch by hand, with the computer I stylise the forms and choose the colours.' From the computer, moreover, come planets (including Earth and Saturn), little stars and other graphic signs. But I would point the finger at the phrase 'with the computer I stylise the forms.' Here is one way among many to seek the essential in a figure: not only does an attitude become immediately recognisable, but an emotion too is transmitted to us clearly and without possibility of misunderstanding. Goodness, emotions from a computer? Well yes: in the 21st century we cannot allow ourselves to see anything strange or unseemly in it. The method works. It should also be noted that the breaking-up of hands and faces (or parts of faces) into sharp areas of different colours, carried out by the computer, besides highlighting, as has been said, their essential characteristics, has the effect in a certain way of flattening them. If painting was for centuries, and for some still is, the feigning of three dimensions on a support that possesses only two, in Akira's human figures the third dimension ends up being symbolic, not actually represented in an attempt at trompe l'oeil as painters did for millennia, first those of ancient Rome and then the Europeans from Giotto onward.
If, instead of paintings depicting a face, Zakamoto's canvases were maps reproducing a mountainous territory, they would not be those that draw the peaks, ridges and valleys with hachures, but those that rely on contour lines: whoever uses the map well knows the meaning of the isohypses and, observing them, sees every characteristic of the relief, but to do so they have set in motion — probably without realising it — that part of the brain that is dedicated to the intelligence of symbols and not to the deciphering of images. And we are coming to the fourth ingredient of our pizza: the composition. With these human figures or their parts in the foreground, the beams of light arriving from above — from spaceships or islands floating in the ether — form a singular contrast. We all have in mind photographs in which the foreground is in focus, and therefore effectively feigns the third dimension, and the background is deliberately out of focus and therefore flat: any of us has surely used this technique more than once in portraits.
But in Zakamoto's canvases it is the foreground that turns out flat, for the reasons just given, while the beams of light (which recall those of a theatre spotlight, and therefore suggest to the observer's unconscious that this is a scene, that something is about to happen there) confer on the background a perfect three-dimensionality, worthy of the Renaissance painters and their floors of marble inlay which, converging toward the throne on which the inevitable Madonna and Child sat, had a not very different purpose. And since we are not used to a flat figure standing out before a three-dimensional background, the resulting effect is one of estrangement and slight disquiet. One might say that the true subject of the painting is not the child or the woman in the foreground, but the beam of cosmic light behind them. To the perspective suggested by the projectors hung from spaceships and space islands are added the original perspectives from top to bottom (a child's face as seen by an adult) and from bottom to top (the adult's face seen by the child). Strange to say, the solution, which may seem obvious, is anything but common: which other painters who have depicted children (there have been legions, and Zakamoto is rightly to be counted among them given the frequency of the subject in his paintings) had the idea of observing them in such a way? Mutatis mutandis, Mantegna's Dead Christ comes to mind, the most stupendous example of the application of an unusual perspective. At this point we have moved to the fifth ingredient: call it what you like, surrealism, metaphysical painting. Already the feeling of expectation, of something (but what?) that will surely happen shortly, is no novelty: it has been noted apropos of De Chirico's Italian Squares. But here and there Zakamoto goes well beyond.
Take a painting like The End of an Era: the impressive Earth with white continents and red oceans is, for a third, immersed in something blue… yes, but, goodness, in what? The sky may indeed be blue, but a planet cannot float in it as in the sea, applying Archimedes' principle! And so this Earth, red with blood, about to sink in an impossible cosmic sea, is a very close relative of the Solitary Swimmer — to stay with De Chirico — who with great strokes crosses his own room, weaving among the furniture. With a leap of era and of quality that is no small matter, we must nonetheless note that, alongside the lessons of great masters of painting, our artist kept in mind (how consciously?) the suggestions offered to him by cartoons, in particular the Japanese ones that were all the rage on TV when he was a child. Many scenes of his canvases seem frames from a cartoon: the child's face in the foreground with eyes and mouth strongly emphasised, the little stars, the spaceships… Here too, nothing scandalous and nothing new either: Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, the two greatest representatives of Pop art, began their careers drawing inspiration from comics, of which, moreover, the division of the image into sharp areas of colour, without gradations or overlaps, is typical.
But comics, cartoons, animated films are conceived — the name says so — to be drawn on paper. And here the sixth point comes into play: the support. Canvas has for centuries been the most obvious and banal of supports; it occurs to no one to notice its presence except when Lucio Fontana punctured or slashed it in search of the third dimension; but here one notices with astonishment that beneath the glossy enamels with which Zakamoto delineated his figures there is, precisely, a canvas. They would seem forms and scenes not for canvas; therefore the presence of the most classic of supports has an impact that is anything but negligible. It tells us: all right, spaceships, little stars, wide-eyed children, drowning planets… but beware, all this is not a cartoon nor a page of Tex or Mickey Mouse; it is a painting with all the proper credentials, and as such you must observe it. The emotion a painting can transmit to you is not the emotion a comic gives you, with all due respect to the latter: we are on different planes. If we connect this to what Zakamoto declares about his method of first elaborating the images on the computer, this passing, as a final act, to canvas, giving them the dignity of paintings, is in a certain way the opposite of the procedure that — in an age when no one had a PC at home — the adepts of Pop art followed: especially at the beginning they worked freehand, or with semi-artisanal techniques, trying to simulate the results given by the industrial processes used in the world of advertising. Typical is the case of Lichtenstein, who painted with a small brush through a perforated metal sheet to feign the graininess that the printing of a photo gives at the large dimensions of an advertising poster. And Warhol said: 'I want to be a machine, and I feel that when I do something… in the manner of a machine I get the result I want.' The opposite of Akira, who masterfully handles a sophisticated machine like the computers of the third millennium but… wants to be a painter. Seventh point.
Behind all the practical devices listed so far there exist theoretical convictions. One of the main ones is: we are all gods. (Incidentally, in the Gospel of John, Jesus, to silence those who accuse him of making himself the son of God, quotes a passage from the Old Testament that reads: I said: you are gods, wrong-footing his interlocutors.) Hence the idea of a performance on the occasion of which 'the visitors reappropriate their deity': Zakamoto interviews them, photographs them, elaborates the image on the computer inserting elements taken from the Internet, and turns it all into a postcard with the words 'I AM GOD,' to be put on the net on the artist's website.
That site will thus end up becoming something similar to Franco Vaccari's personal room at the 1972 Venice Biennale: visitors photographed themselves with a Polaroid and hung their image on the wall, so that by the end of the show there were thousands. Similar, but much more refined both graphically (no computer elaborations for Vaccari) and conceptually (there the visitors were simply invited to leave a trace of their passage; they were not promoted to gods). Eighth and final point. Luca Motolese was not content to change his first and last name: art history is full of painters who chose pseudonyms, and some are big names — think of Alberto Savinio. No, he even wrote himself a slightly demented Japanese autobiography, including an abduction by aliens (for otherwise how would there be so many spaceships and sidereal islands in his paintings?).
The reader half smiles, amused by this ironic mockery, and is half tempted to believe that, underneath, there is something serious: the allegory of a sudden and profound change in the artist's way of perceiving reality, due perhaps to some event no less traumatic than an abduction into space. The fact remains that the Japanese frame — to which the aforementioned cartoons are perhaps not unrelated — has its own charm; and from Italy to the Land of the Rising Sun, in the surname that changes — from Motolese to Zakamoto — the syllables MOTO fortunately remain unchanged, because it was evidently written in the stars that our man would become a motorcyclist… I began with an irreverence and I end with another: to me the pseudonym irresistibly recalls Tofusho Lamoto, the ridiculous Japanese motorcycling champion who, when I was young, featured in the advertisement for Doctor Ciccarelli's corn remover. As we have seen, what seemed an all in all simple dish (a Margherita pizza?) has instead revealed to us a number of ingredients we did not suspect. They were chosen and mixed with wisdom.
And surely the eight I have listed are not all: it is up to the reader to identify the others. They have illustrious precedents in the art history of the Twentieth Century and, in some cases, of previous centuries. This does not mean that Akira has pedantically copied others' ideas or techniques: it means that he is not a pretentious improviser, that he has solid foundations. Naturally it is not enough for there to be numerous good ingredients for a dish to turn out exquisite; but if the ingredients are few and bad, we cannot expect much… And so, are Zakamoto's paintings beautiful or ugly? If what Walter Gropius maintains is true — namely that beauty depends 'on the sure mastery of all the scientific, technical and formal requirements that constitute an organism' — they ought to be beautiful. But the question is futile. Tristan Tzara, the prophet of Dadaism, wrote that 'a work of art is never beautiful by decree of law, objectively, unanimously.' So you decide, reader, whether the square canvases of our pseudo-Japanese are to your liking.
I like them. My mother — who is the wife of a painter — does too. But at this point, if you have had the patience to follow me this far, you will understand that it is time to stop with words and to sit down at the table. 'To look at a painting one needs a chair,' Paul Klee maintained, but he did not advise also taking a knife, fork and napkin. Here, instead, the pizza is served: enjoy your meal!
Osservare un quadro o una scultura e mangiarsi una torta o una pizza non sono, tutto sommato, attività molto diverse. Ci sono due modi per farlo. Il primo: non pensare, assaporare forme e colori, sapori e profumi con la metà destra del cervello, quella che si occupa delle emozioni. Il secondo: servirsi della metà sinistra, quella razionale, per capire quali sono gli ingredienti, come e perchè sono stati combinati e trattati. Il modo giusto è il primo, ma anche il secondo può essere utile a patto che non sia fine a se stesso ma ci aiuti ad abbandonarci in modo più consapevole alle sensazioni che il succulento piatto che abbiamo dinanzi ci suggerisce.
Se poi ti pare irriverente paragonare un dipinto di Akira Zakamoto a una altrettanto variopinta pizza quattro stagioni, ricorda che l'arte del Novecento ha avuto sovente fra le sue principali caratteristiche l'irriverenza: perciò parlare in modo irriverente di un artista che vive a cavallo fra ventesimo e ventunesimo secolo mi pare perfettamente lecito. Scopriamo dunque, uno per uno, gli ingredienti. Primo: il formato. Benché Zakamoto non sdegni tele rettangolari, con notevole frequenza egli usa tele quadrate. Nella mostra Isole / Le roccaforti del sogno (Rivoli 2003) campeggiava un'installazione (così la definiva lui, anche se oggi il termine fa pensare a tutt'altro) costituita da ventiquattro tele 50 per 50 dal titolo Il futuro ritorna, cui facevano riscontro rare tele rettangolari. Nella storia della pittura il supporto quadrato non è la regola, ma ci sono stati negli ultimi cent'anni artisti che lo hanno preferito. Kazimir Malevic, il profeta del Suprematismo russo, considerava il quadrato nero "lo zero delle forme" e gli attribuiva tale importanza che quando morì gli venne posto appunto un quadrato nero a capo del letto e un altro venne dipinto sulla sua tomba. Se dagli anni Dieci passiamo agli anni Sessanta del secolo scorso, di Joseph Albers sono famosi gli Omaggi al quadrato; Robert Ryman, caposcuola della Pittura Opaca, ha dipinto solo quadrati bianchi; e anche Ad Reinhardt e Frank Stella hanno mostrato una spiccata predilezione per la medesima forma. Tuttavia la loro pittura non era figurativa.
Per chi invece vuol fissare sulla tela una scena o un ritratto il formato rettangolare è quasi di rigore, sulla scia dell'abitudine che ci ha dato la macchina fotografica: tramontate le fortune delle pellicole 6 x 6, per decenni il formato 24 x 36 ha spadroneggiato, cosicché quando ti prepari a scattare una foto la prima cosa che pensi è: l'inquadratura migliore sarà verticale o orizzontale? Passando alle fotocamere digitali non c'era, in assenza di pellicola, un reale motivo per continuare con rettangoli, ma tale era l'abitudine che si è scelto di farlo – anche perché il monitor del computer, la televisione e il proiettore non si sognano affatto di darti immagini quadrate.
Zakamoto dunque va controccorrente. C'è da aggiungere che il quadrato è una figura geometrica carica di significati simbolici: mentre il cerchio rappresenta il cielo, il quadrato è la terra. Ma il discorso ci porterebbe troppo in là . Secondo: i colori. Il pittore giapponese, o pseudo tale, non li mescola. Niente sfumature. Quello che è rosso è rosso, quello che è verde è verde. E siccome usa smalti, che ti danno una superficie uniforme anziché tutta alti e bassi come fanno i colori a olio, l'effetto è potenziato. Sembra dire, con gioia infantile: il colore è bello, godiamocelo così com'è; perché pasticciarlo, rovinarlo? Però attenzione. Il pittore dipinge forme chiaramente riconoscibili; ma i colori non necessariamente sono quelli che la natura e il senso comune suggeriscono. Un cielo può anche essere blu, ma non è affatto detto che lo sia; se poi è rosso, non vuol dire che quella sia un'aurora o un tramonto. L'unica preoccupazione è che gli accostamenti di questi colori puri funzionino: che esprimano ciò che egli ha in mente di esprimere. Il resto non conta: Zakamoto è altrettanto lontano dall'uso obbligato di colori naturali quanto dalla ricerca artificiosa di colori innaturali al solo scopo di stupire.
Non credo che egli sia convinto, come Kandinskij, che il giallo sembri espandersi e avvicinarsi, che il blu si contragga e si allontani, che il viola sia malato e l'arancione sano; ma è indubbio che egli scelga i colori in base a una sua logica interna e personale, che si sia creato una gerarchia di valori e di significati (magari assai diversi da quelli del maestro russo) alla quale si attiene rigorosamente. La scelta dei colori è collegata, insieme a molto altro, al terzo punto: il sapiente uso del computer. Qualcuno si vergognerebbe di ammettere che si serve del computer per metter giù il bozzetto di un quadro; lui no. Del resto oggi gli architetti non disegnano al computer tutto ciò che fino a poco fa disegnavano a mano? Scrive Zakamoto: "utilizzo immagini fotografiche fatte con una camera digitale, quindi produco uno schizzo grossolano a mano, con il computer stilizzo le forme e scelgo i colori." Dal computer inoltre arrivano pianeti (compresi la Terra e Saturno), stelline e altri segni grafici. Ma punterei il dito sulla frase "con il computer stilizzo le forme". Ecco un modo come molti altri per ricercare in una figura l'essenziale: non solo un atteggiamento diventa immediatamente riconoscibile, ma anche un'emozione ci viene trasmessa con chiarezza e senza possibilità di equivoci. Diamine, emozioni da un computer? Ebbene sì: nel XXI secolo non possiamo permetterci di vedervi nulla di strano o scoveniente. Il metodo funziona. Va inoltre notato che la scomposizione di mani e volti (o parti di volti) in aree nette di colori diversi effettuata dal computer oltre a metterne in evidenza, come si è detto, le caratteristiche essenziali ha l'effetto in certo modo di appiattirli. Se la pittura è stata per secoli, e per qualcuno è ancora, il fingere le tre dimensioni su un supporto che ne possiede solo due, nelle figure umane di Akira la terza dimensione finisce per risultare simbolica, non effettivamente rappresentata in un tentativo di trompe l'oeil come hanno fatto per millenni i pittori, prima quelli di Roma antica e poi quelli europei da Giotto in poi.
Se anziché quadri che raffigurano un volto le tele di Zakamoto fossero carte geografiche che riproducono un territorio montuoso, non sarebbero di quelle che disegnano al tratteggio le vette, le creste e le valli, ma di quelle che si affidano alle curve di livello: chi utilizza la carta ben conosce il significato delle isoipse e osservandole vede ogni caratteristica del rilievo, ma per farlo ha messo in moto – probabilmente senza rendersene conto – quella parte di cervello che è deputata all'intelligenza dei simboli e non alla decifrazione delle immagini. E stiamo arrivando al quarto ingrediente della nostra pizza: la composizione. Con queste figure umane o loro parti in primo piano fanno singolare contrasto i fasci di luce che giungono dall'alto, da astronavi o isole galleggianti nell'etere. Tutti noi abbiamo presenti fotografie in cui il primo piano è a fuoco, e perciò finge efficacemente la terza dimensione, e lo sfondo è volutamente sfocato e perciò piatto: chiunque di noi ha sicuramente usato più di una volta questa tecnica nei ritratti.
Ma nelle tele di Zakamoto è il primo piano a risultare piatto per quanto si è appena detto, mentre i fasci di luce (che ricordano quelli di un proiettore da teatro, e perciò suggeriscono all'inconscio dell'osservatore che quella è una scena, che lì sta per accadere qualcosa) conferiscono allo sfondo una tridimensionalità perfetta, degna dei pittori rinascimentali e dei loro pavimenti a tarsie marmoree che, convergendo verso il trono su cui sedeva l'immancabile Madonna con Bambino, avevano uno scopo non molto diverso. E siccome non siamo abituati a una figura piatta che campeggi davanti a uno sfondo tridimensionale, l'effetto che ne risulta è di straniamento e di leggera inquietudine. Si potrebbe dire che il vero soggetto del quadro non è il bimbo o la donna in primo piano, è il fascio di luce cosmica che gli sta dietro. Alla prospettiva suggerita dai proiettori appesi ad astronavi ed isole spaziali si affiancano le originali prospettive dall'alto in basso (il volto di un bimbo come è visto da un adulto) e dal basso in alto (il volto dell'adulto visto dal bimbo). Strano a dirsi, la soluzione, che può parere ovvia, è tutt'altro che comune: a quali altri pittori che abbiano raffigurato bambini (ce ne sono state legioni, e Zakamoto va inserito a buon diritto nel numero data la frequenza del soggetto nei suoi quadri) è venuta l'idea di osservarli in tal modo? Mutatis mutandis, viene in mente il Cristo morto del Mantegna, l'esempio più strepitoso dell'applicazione di una prospettiva insolita. A questo punto siamo passati al quinto ingrediente: chiamatelo come volete, surrealismo, pittura metafisica. Già il sentimento di attesa, di qualcosa (ma che cosa?) che sicuramente capiterà di qui a poco, non è una novità : è stato notato a proposito delle Piazze d'Italia di De Chirico. Ma qua e là Zakamoto va ben oltre.
Prendiamo un quadro come La fine di un'era: l'impressionante Terra con i continenti bianchi e gli oceani rossi è per un terzo immersa in qualcosa di blu… sì ma, diamine, in che cosa? Il cielo può essere anche blu, ma un pianeta non può galleggiarvi come nel mare, applicando il principio di Archimede! E allora questa Terra rossa di sangue che sta per andare a fondo in un impossibile mare cosmico è parente assai stretta del Nuotatore solitario – per restare a De Chirico – che a grandi bracciate attraversa la propria stanza districandosi fra i mobili. Con un salto d'epoca e di qualità non da poco, dobbiamo però constatare che accanto alle lezioni di grandi maestri della pittura il nostro artista ha tenuto presenti (fino a che punto consciamente?) i suggerimenti che gli offrivano i cartoni animati, in particolare quelli giapponesi che furoreggiavano alla TV quando egli era fanciullo. Molte scene delle sue tele sembrano fotogrammi di un cartone animato: il volto del bimbo in primo piano con occhi e bocca in forte evidenza, le stelline, le astronavi… Anche qui, niente di scandaloso e neppure di nuovo: Andy Warhol e Roy Lichtenstein, i due massimi rappresentanti della Pop art, hanno iniziato la loro carriera ispirandosi ai fumetti, dei quali del resto è tipica la suddivisione dell'immagine in aree nette di colore, senza sfumature o sovrapposizioni.
Ma i fumetti, i cartoons, i cartoni animati son concepiti – lo dice il nome – per essere disegnati su carta. E qui entra in gioco il sesto punto: il supporto. La tela è da secoli il più ovvio e banale dei supporti, a nessuno viene in mente di notarne la presenza se non quando Lucio Fontana l'ha bucata o squarciata alla ricerca della terza dimensione; ma qui uno si accorge con stupore che sotto i lucidi smalti con cui Zakamoto ha delineato le sue figure c'è, appunto, una tela. Sembrerebbero forme e scene non da tela; perciò la presenza del più classico dei supporti ha un impatto tutt'altro che trascurabile. Ci dice: va bene, astronavi, stelline, bimbi dagli occhi sgranati, pianeti che affogano… ma attenzione, tutto questo non è un cartone animato né una pagina di Tex o Topolino, è un quadro con tutti i crismi e come tale lo dovete osservare. L'emozione che può trasmettervi un quadro non è l'emozione che vi dà un fumetto, con tutto il rispetto per quest'ultimo: siamo su piani diversi. Se ci riallacciamo a quanto Zakamoto dichiara circa il suo metodo di elaborare dapprima le immagini al computer, questo passare, come atto finale, alla tela dando loro la dignità di quadri è in certo modo il contrario del procedimento che seguivano – in un'epoca in cui nessuno aveva a casa propria un PC – gli adepti della Pop art: soprattutto all'inizio essi operavano a mano libera, o con tecniche semiartigianali, cercando di simulare i risultati che davano le lavorazioni industriali usate nel mondo della pubblicità . Tipico il caso di Lichtenstein, che dipingeva con uno spazzolino attraverso una lamiera forata per fingere la sgranatura che dà la stampa di una foto alle grandi dimensioni di un manifesto pubblicitario. E Warhol diceva: "voglio essere una macchina, e sento che quando faccio una cosa… alla maniera di una macchina ottengo il risultato che voglio." L'opposto di Akira, che maneggia da maestro una macchina sofisticata come i computer del terzo millennio ma… vuol essere un pittore. Settimo punto.
Alle spalle di tutti gli espedienti pratici fin qui elencati esistono delle convinzioni teoriche. Una fra le principali è: siamo tutti dei. (Tra parentesi, nel Vangelo di Giovanni Gesù, per tappar la bocca a chi lo accusa di farsi figlio di Dio, cita un passo dell'Antico Testamento che suona: Io ho detto: voi siete dèi, spiazzando gli interlocutori.) Di qui l'idea di una performance in occasione della quale "i visitatori si riapproprino della loro deità ": Zakamoto li intervista, li fotografa, elabora al computer l'immagine inserendovi elementi tratti da Internet e trasforma il tutto in una cartolina con la scritta "IO SONO DIO", da immettere nella rete nel sito dell'artista.
Tale sito finirà dunque per diventare qualcosa di simile alla sala personale di Franco Vaccari alla Biennale veneziana del 1972: i visitatori si autofotagrafavano con una Polaroid e appendevano al muro la loro immagine, cosicché a fine mostra ce n'erano migliaia. Simile, ma molto più raffinato sia dal punto di vista grafico (niente elaborazioni al computer per Vaccari) sia da quello concettuale (là i visitatori erano semplicemente invitati a lasciar traccia del proprio passaggio, non erano promossi a dèi). Ottavo e ultimo punto. Luca Motolese non si è accontentato di cambiar nome e cognome: di pittori che hanno scelto pseudonimi la storia dell'arte è piena e alcuni sono grossi nomi – pensiamo ad Alberto Savinio. No, lui si è pure scritto un'autobiografia giapponese un tantino demenziale, comprendente anche un rapimento da parte degli alieni (perché altrimenti come mai ci sarebbero tante astronavi e isole siderali nei suoi quadri?).
Il lettore un po' sorride divertito di questa ironica presa in giro e un po' è tentato di credere che sotto sotto ci sia qualcosa di serio: l'allegoria di un improvviso e profondo cambiamento nel modo di percepire la realtà da parte dell'artista, dovuto magari a qualche evento non meno traumatico di un rapimento nello spazio. Resta il fatto che la cornice giapponese – alla quale non sono forse estranei i citati cartoni animati – ha un suo fascino; e dall'Italia al Sol Levante nel cognome che muta – da Motolese a Zakamoto – rimangono fortunatamente invariate le sillabe MOTO, perché era evidentemente scritto nelle stelle che il nostro sarebbe diventato un motociclista… Ho iniziato con un'irriverenza e termino con un'altra: a me lo pseudonimo ricorda irresistibilmente Tofusho Lamoto, il ridicolo campione motociclistico giapponese che quando ero giovane campeggiava nella pubblicità del callifugo del Dottor Ciccarelli. Come abbiamo visto, quello che pareva un piatto tutto sommato semplice (una pizza Margherita?) ci ha invece rivelato un numero di ingredienti che non sospettavamo. Essi sono stati scelti e mescolati con sapienza.
E sicuramente gli otto che ho elencato non sono tutti: al lettore il compito di identificare gli altri. Essi hanno illustri precedenti nella storia dell'arte del Ventesimo Secolo e in qualche caso dei secoli precedenti. Questo non vuol dire che Akira abbia pedestremente copiato idee o tecniche altrui: vuol dire che non è un velleitario improvvisatore, che ha solide basi. Naturalmente non basta che vi siano numerosi buoni ingredienti perché un piatto risulti sopraffino; se però gli ingredienti sono pochi e cattivi, non potremo aspettarci gran che… E allora, sono belli o sono brutti i quadri di Zakamoto? Se è vero quello che sostiene Walter Gropius, ossia che la bellezza dipende "dalla sicura padronanza di tutti i requisiti scientifici, tecnici e formali che costituiscono un organismo", dovrebbero essere belli. Ma la domanda è futile. Tristan Tzara, il profeta del Dadaismo, scriveva che "un'opera d'arte non è mai bella per decreto legge, obiettivamente, all'unanimità ". Dunque decidi tu, lettore, se le tele quadrate del nostro pseudo-giapponese ti vanno a genio.
A me piacciono. A mia madre – che è moglie di un pittore – anche. Ma a questo punto se hai avuto la pazienza di seguirmi fin qui capirai che è tempo di smetterla con le parole e di sedersi a tavola. "Per guardare un quadro ci vuole una sedia", sosteneva Paul Klee, ma non consigliava di prendere anche coltello, forchetta e tovagliolo. Qui, invece, la pizza è servita: buon appetito!
Se poi ti pare irriverente paragonare un dipinto di Akira Zakamoto a una altrettanto variopinta pizza quattro stagioni, ricorda che l'arte del Novecento ha avuto sovente fra le sue principali caratteristiche l'irriverenza: perciò parlare in modo irriverente di un artista che vive a cavallo fra ventesimo e ventunesimo secolo mi pare perfettamente lecito. Scopriamo dunque, uno per uno, gli ingredienti. Primo: il formato. Benché Zakamoto non sdegni tele rettangolari, con notevole frequenza egli usa tele quadrate. Nella mostra Isole / Le roccaforti del sogno (Rivoli 2003) campeggiava un'installazione (così la definiva lui, anche se oggi il termine fa pensare a tutt'altro) costituita da ventiquattro tele 50 per 50 dal titolo Il futuro ritorna, cui facevano riscontro rare tele rettangolari. Nella storia della pittura il supporto quadrato non è la regola, ma ci sono stati negli ultimi cent'anni artisti che lo hanno preferito. Kazimir Malevic, il profeta del Suprematismo russo, considerava il quadrato nero "lo zero delle forme" e gli attribuiva tale importanza che quando morì gli venne posto appunto un quadrato nero a capo del letto e un altro venne dipinto sulla sua tomba. Se dagli anni Dieci passiamo agli anni Sessanta del secolo scorso, di Joseph Albers sono famosi gli Omaggi al quadrato; Robert Ryman, caposcuola della Pittura Opaca, ha dipinto solo quadrati bianchi; e anche Ad Reinhardt e Frank Stella hanno mostrato una spiccata predilezione per la medesima forma. Tuttavia la loro pittura non era figurativa.
Per chi invece vuol fissare sulla tela una scena o un ritratto il formato rettangolare è quasi di rigore, sulla scia dell'abitudine che ci ha dato la macchina fotografica: tramontate le fortune delle pellicole 6 x 6, per decenni il formato 24 x 36 ha spadroneggiato, cosicché quando ti prepari a scattare una foto la prima cosa che pensi è: l'inquadratura migliore sarà verticale o orizzontale? Passando alle fotocamere digitali non c'era, in assenza di pellicola, un reale motivo per continuare con rettangoli, ma tale era l'abitudine che si è scelto di farlo – anche perché il monitor del computer, la televisione e il proiettore non si sognano affatto di darti immagini quadrate.
Zakamoto dunque va controccorrente. C'è da aggiungere che il quadrato è una figura geometrica carica di significati simbolici: mentre il cerchio rappresenta il cielo, il quadrato è la terra. Ma il discorso ci porterebbe troppo in là . Secondo: i colori. Il pittore giapponese, o pseudo tale, non li mescola. Niente sfumature. Quello che è rosso è rosso, quello che è verde è verde. E siccome usa smalti, che ti danno una superficie uniforme anziché tutta alti e bassi come fanno i colori a olio, l'effetto è potenziato. Sembra dire, con gioia infantile: il colore è bello, godiamocelo così com'è; perché pasticciarlo, rovinarlo? Però attenzione. Il pittore dipinge forme chiaramente riconoscibili; ma i colori non necessariamente sono quelli che la natura e il senso comune suggeriscono. Un cielo può anche essere blu, ma non è affatto detto che lo sia; se poi è rosso, non vuol dire che quella sia un'aurora o un tramonto. L'unica preoccupazione è che gli accostamenti di questi colori puri funzionino: che esprimano ciò che egli ha in mente di esprimere. Il resto non conta: Zakamoto è altrettanto lontano dall'uso obbligato di colori naturali quanto dalla ricerca artificiosa di colori innaturali al solo scopo di stupire.
Non credo che egli sia convinto, come Kandinskij, che il giallo sembri espandersi e avvicinarsi, che il blu si contragga e si allontani, che il viola sia malato e l'arancione sano; ma è indubbio che egli scelga i colori in base a una sua logica interna e personale, che si sia creato una gerarchia di valori e di significati (magari assai diversi da quelli del maestro russo) alla quale si attiene rigorosamente. La scelta dei colori è collegata, insieme a molto altro, al terzo punto: il sapiente uso del computer. Qualcuno si vergognerebbe di ammettere che si serve del computer per metter giù il bozzetto di un quadro; lui no. Del resto oggi gli architetti non disegnano al computer tutto ciò che fino a poco fa disegnavano a mano? Scrive Zakamoto: "utilizzo immagini fotografiche fatte con una camera digitale, quindi produco uno schizzo grossolano a mano, con il computer stilizzo le forme e scelgo i colori." Dal computer inoltre arrivano pianeti (compresi la Terra e Saturno), stelline e altri segni grafici. Ma punterei il dito sulla frase "con il computer stilizzo le forme". Ecco un modo come molti altri per ricercare in una figura l'essenziale: non solo un atteggiamento diventa immediatamente riconoscibile, ma anche un'emozione ci viene trasmessa con chiarezza e senza possibilità di equivoci. Diamine, emozioni da un computer? Ebbene sì: nel XXI secolo non possiamo permetterci di vedervi nulla di strano o scoveniente. Il metodo funziona. Va inoltre notato che la scomposizione di mani e volti (o parti di volti) in aree nette di colori diversi effettuata dal computer oltre a metterne in evidenza, come si è detto, le caratteristiche essenziali ha l'effetto in certo modo di appiattirli. Se la pittura è stata per secoli, e per qualcuno è ancora, il fingere le tre dimensioni su un supporto che ne possiede solo due, nelle figure umane di Akira la terza dimensione finisce per risultare simbolica, non effettivamente rappresentata in un tentativo di trompe l'oeil come hanno fatto per millenni i pittori, prima quelli di Roma antica e poi quelli europei da Giotto in poi.
Se anziché quadri che raffigurano un volto le tele di Zakamoto fossero carte geografiche che riproducono un territorio montuoso, non sarebbero di quelle che disegnano al tratteggio le vette, le creste e le valli, ma di quelle che si affidano alle curve di livello: chi utilizza la carta ben conosce il significato delle isoipse e osservandole vede ogni caratteristica del rilievo, ma per farlo ha messo in moto – probabilmente senza rendersene conto – quella parte di cervello che è deputata all'intelligenza dei simboli e non alla decifrazione delle immagini. E stiamo arrivando al quarto ingrediente della nostra pizza: la composizione. Con queste figure umane o loro parti in primo piano fanno singolare contrasto i fasci di luce che giungono dall'alto, da astronavi o isole galleggianti nell'etere. Tutti noi abbiamo presenti fotografie in cui il primo piano è a fuoco, e perciò finge efficacemente la terza dimensione, e lo sfondo è volutamente sfocato e perciò piatto: chiunque di noi ha sicuramente usato più di una volta questa tecnica nei ritratti.
Ma nelle tele di Zakamoto è il primo piano a risultare piatto per quanto si è appena detto, mentre i fasci di luce (che ricordano quelli di un proiettore da teatro, e perciò suggeriscono all'inconscio dell'osservatore che quella è una scena, che lì sta per accadere qualcosa) conferiscono allo sfondo una tridimensionalità perfetta, degna dei pittori rinascimentali e dei loro pavimenti a tarsie marmoree che, convergendo verso il trono su cui sedeva l'immancabile Madonna con Bambino, avevano uno scopo non molto diverso. E siccome non siamo abituati a una figura piatta che campeggi davanti a uno sfondo tridimensionale, l'effetto che ne risulta è di straniamento e di leggera inquietudine. Si potrebbe dire che il vero soggetto del quadro non è il bimbo o la donna in primo piano, è il fascio di luce cosmica che gli sta dietro. Alla prospettiva suggerita dai proiettori appesi ad astronavi ed isole spaziali si affiancano le originali prospettive dall'alto in basso (il volto di un bimbo come è visto da un adulto) e dal basso in alto (il volto dell'adulto visto dal bimbo). Strano a dirsi, la soluzione, che può parere ovvia, è tutt'altro che comune: a quali altri pittori che abbiano raffigurato bambini (ce ne sono state legioni, e Zakamoto va inserito a buon diritto nel numero data la frequenza del soggetto nei suoi quadri) è venuta l'idea di osservarli in tal modo? Mutatis mutandis, viene in mente il Cristo morto del Mantegna, l'esempio più strepitoso dell'applicazione di una prospettiva insolita. A questo punto siamo passati al quinto ingrediente: chiamatelo come volete, surrealismo, pittura metafisica. Già il sentimento di attesa, di qualcosa (ma che cosa?) che sicuramente capiterà di qui a poco, non è una novità : è stato notato a proposito delle Piazze d'Italia di De Chirico. Ma qua e là Zakamoto va ben oltre.
Prendiamo un quadro come La fine di un'era: l'impressionante Terra con i continenti bianchi e gli oceani rossi è per un terzo immersa in qualcosa di blu… sì ma, diamine, in che cosa? Il cielo può essere anche blu, ma un pianeta non può galleggiarvi come nel mare, applicando il principio di Archimede! E allora questa Terra rossa di sangue che sta per andare a fondo in un impossibile mare cosmico è parente assai stretta del Nuotatore solitario – per restare a De Chirico – che a grandi bracciate attraversa la propria stanza districandosi fra i mobili. Con un salto d'epoca e di qualità non da poco, dobbiamo però constatare che accanto alle lezioni di grandi maestri della pittura il nostro artista ha tenuto presenti (fino a che punto consciamente?) i suggerimenti che gli offrivano i cartoni animati, in particolare quelli giapponesi che furoreggiavano alla TV quando egli era fanciullo. Molte scene delle sue tele sembrano fotogrammi di un cartone animato: il volto del bimbo in primo piano con occhi e bocca in forte evidenza, le stelline, le astronavi… Anche qui, niente di scandaloso e neppure di nuovo: Andy Warhol e Roy Lichtenstein, i due massimi rappresentanti della Pop art, hanno iniziato la loro carriera ispirandosi ai fumetti, dei quali del resto è tipica la suddivisione dell'immagine in aree nette di colore, senza sfumature o sovrapposizioni.
Ma i fumetti, i cartoons, i cartoni animati son concepiti – lo dice il nome – per essere disegnati su carta. E qui entra in gioco il sesto punto: il supporto. La tela è da secoli il più ovvio e banale dei supporti, a nessuno viene in mente di notarne la presenza se non quando Lucio Fontana l'ha bucata o squarciata alla ricerca della terza dimensione; ma qui uno si accorge con stupore che sotto i lucidi smalti con cui Zakamoto ha delineato le sue figure c'è, appunto, una tela. Sembrerebbero forme e scene non da tela; perciò la presenza del più classico dei supporti ha un impatto tutt'altro che trascurabile. Ci dice: va bene, astronavi, stelline, bimbi dagli occhi sgranati, pianeti che affogano… ma attenzione, tutto questo non è un cartone animato né una pagina di Tex o Topolino, è un quadro con tutti i crismi e come tale lo dovete osservare. L'emozione che può trasmettervi un quadro non è l'emozione che vi dà un fumetto, con tutto il rispetto per quest'ultimo: siamo su piani diversi. Se ci riallacciamo a quanto Zakamoto dichiara circa il suo metodo di elaborare dapprima le immagini al computer, questo passare, come atto finale, alla tela dando loro la dignità di quadri è in certo modo il contrario del procedimento che seguivano – in un'epoca in cui nessuno aveva a casa propria un PC – gli adepti della Pop art: soprattutto all'inizio essi operavano a mano libera, o con tecniche semiartigianali, cercando di simulare i risultati che davano le lavorazioni industriali usate nel mondo della pubblicità . Tipico il caso di Lichtenstein, che dipingeva con uno spazzolino attraverso una lamiera forata per fingere la sgranatura che dà la stampa di una foto alle grandi dimensioni di un manifesto pubblicitario. E Warhol diceva: "voglio essere una macchina, e sento che quando faccio una cosa… alla maniera di una macchina ottengo il risultato che voglio." L'opposto di Akira, che maneggia da maestro una macchina sofisticata come i computer del terzo millennio ma… vuol essere un pittore. Settimo punto.
Alle spalle di tutti gli espedienti pratici fin qui elencati esistono delle convinzioni teoriche. Una fra le principali è: siamo tutti dei. (Tra parentesi, nel Vangelo di Giovanni Gesù, per tappar la bocca a chi lo accusa di farsi figlio di Dio, cita un passo dell'Antico Testamento che suona: Io ho detto: voi siete dèi, spiazzando gli interlocutori.) Di qui l'idea di una performance in occasione della quale "i visitatori si riapproprino della loro deità ": Zakamoto li intervista, li fotografa, elabora al computer l'immagine inserendovi elementi tratti da Internet e trasforma il tutto in una cartolina con la scritta "IO SONO DIO", da immettere nella rete nel sito dell'artista.
Tale sito finirà dunque per diventare qualcosa di simile alla sala personale di Franco Vaccari alla Biennale veneziana del 1972: i visitatori si autofotagrafavano con una Polaroid e appendevano al muro la loro immagine, cosicché a fine mostra ce n'erano migliaia. Simile, ma molto più raffinato sia dal punto di vista grafico (niente elaborazioni al computer per Vaccari) sia da quello concettuale (là i visitatori erano semplicemente invitati a lasciar traccia del proprio passaggio, non erano promossi a dèi). Ottavo e ultimo punto. Luca Motolese non si è accontentato di cambiar nome e cognome: di pittori che hanno scelto pseudonimi la storia dell'arte è piena e alcuni sono grossi nomi – pensiamo ad Alberto Savinio. No, lui si è pure scritto un'autobiografia giapponese un tantino demenziale, comprendente anche un rapimento da parte degli alieni (perché altrimenti come mai ci sarebbero tante astronavi e isole siderali nei suoi quadri?).
Il lettore un po' sorride divertito di questa ironica presa in giro e un po' è tentato di credere che sotto sotto ci sia qualcosa di serio: l'allegoria di un improvviso e profondo cambiamento nel modo di percepire la realtà da parte dell'artista, dovuto magari a qualche evento non meno traumatico di un rapimento nello spazio. Resta il fatto che la cornice giapponese – alla quale non sono forse estranei i citati cartoni animati – ha un suo fascino; e dall'Italia al Sol Levante nel cognome che muta – da Motolese a Zakamoto – rimangono fortunatamente invariate le sillabe MOTO, perché era evidentemente scritto nelle stelle che il nostro sarebbe diventato un motociclista… Ho iniziato con un'irriverenza e termino con un'altra: a me lo pseudonimo ricorda irresistibilmente Tofusho Lamoto, il ridicolo campione motociclistico giapponese che quando ero giovane campeggiava nella pubblicità del callifugo del Dottor Ciccarelli. Come abbiamo visto, quello che pareva un piatto tutto sommato semplice (una pizza Margherita?) ci ha invece rivelato un numero di ingredienti che non sospettavamo. Essi sono stati scelti e mescolati con sapienza.
E sicuramente gli otto che ho elencato non sono tutti: al lettore il compito di identificare gli altri. Essi hanno illustri precedenti nella storia dell'arte del Ventesimo Secolo e in qualche caso dei secoli precedenti. Questo non vuol dire che Akira abbia pedestremente copiato idee o tecniche altrui: vuol dire che non è un velleitario improvvisatore, che ha solide basi. Naturalmente non basta che vi siano numerosi buoni ingredienti perché un piatto risulti sopraffino; se però gli ingredienti sono pochi e cattivi, non potremo aspettarci gran che… E allora, sono belli o sono brutti i quadri di Zakamoto? Se è vero quello che sostiene Walter Gropius, ossia che la bellezza dipende "dalla sicura padronanza di tutti i requisiti scientifici, tecnici e formali che costituiscono un organismo", dovrebbero essere belli. Ma la domanda è futile. Tristan Tzara, il profeta del Dadaismo, scriveva che "un'opera d'arte non è mai bella per decreto legge, obiettivamente, all'unanimità ". Dunque decidi tu, lettore, se le tele quadrate del nostro pseudo-giapponese ti vanno a genio.
A me piacciono. A mia madre – che è moglie di un pittore – anche. Ma a questo punto se hai avuto la pazienza di seguirmi fin qui capirai che è tempo di smetterla con le parole e di sedersi a tavola. "Per guardare un quadro ci vuole una sedia", sosteneva Paul Klee, ma non consigliava di prendere anche coltello, forchetta e tovagliolo. Qui, invece, la pizza è servita: buon appetito!
Observing a painting or a sculpture and eating a cake or a pizza are not, all in all, very different activities. There are two ways to do it. The first: not to think, to savour shapes and colours, flavours and aromas with the right half of the brain, the one that deals with emotions. The second: to use the left half, the rational one, to understand what the ingredients are, how and why they were combined and treated. The right way is the first, but the second can also be useful, provided it is not an end in itself but helps us abandon ourselves more consciously to the sensations that the succulent dish before us suggests.
And if it seems irreverent to you to compare a painting by Akira Zakamoto to an equally colourful four-seasons pizza, remember that twentieth-century art often had irreverence among its main characteristics: therefore speaking irreverently of an artist who lives astride the twentieth and twenty-first centuries seems perfectly legitimate to me. Let us discover, then, one by one, the ingredients. First: the format. Although Zakamoto does not disdain rectangular canvases, with notable frequency he uses square ones. In the exhibition Islands / The Strongholds of Dream (Rivoli 2003) there stood out an installation (so he called it, even if today the term suggests something quite different) made of twenty-four canvases of 50 by 50, titled The Future Returns, set against rare rectangular canvases. In the history of painting the square support is not the rule, but over the last hundred years there have been artists who preferred it. Kazimir Malevich, the prophet of Russian Suprematism, considered the black square 'the zero of forms' and attributed such importance to it that when he died a black square was placed at the head of his bed and another was painted on his tomb. If from the 1910s we move to the 1960s of the last century, Josef Albers's Homages to the Square are famous; Robert Ryman, the leader of Opaque Painting, painted only white squares; and Ad Reinhardt and Frank Stella too showed a marked predilection for the same form. Yet their painting was not figurative.
For those who instead want to fix a scene or a portrait on canvas, the rectangular format is almost obligatory, in the wake of the habit the camera gave us: with the fortunes of 6 x 6 film over, for decades the 24 x 36 format dominated, so that when you prepare to take a photo the first thing you think is: will the best framing be vertical or horizontal? Moving to digital cameras there was, in the absence of film, no real reason to continue with rectangles, but such was the habit that the choice was made to do so — also because the computer monitor, the television and the projector do not dream at all of giving you square images.
Zakamoto, therefore, goes against the current. It should be added that the square is a geometric figure laden with symbolic meanings: while the circle represents the sky, the square is the earth. But the discourse would take us too far. Second: the colours. The Japanese painter, or pseudo-such, does not mix them. No gradations. What is red is red, what is green is green. And since he uses enamels, which give you a uniform surface rather than one all highs and lows as oil colours do, the effect is heightened. He seems to say, with childish joy: colour is beautiful, let us enjoy it as it is; why mess it up, ruin it? But beware. The painter paints clearly recognisable forms; yet the colours are not necessarily those that nature and common sense suggest. A sky may indeed be blue, but it is by no means certain that it is; and if it is red, that does not mean it is a dawn or a sunset. The only concern is that the juxtapositions of these pure colours work: that they express what he has in mind to express. The rest does not matter: Zakamoto is as far from the obligatory use of natural colours as from the contrived search for unnatural colours for the sole purpose of astonishing.
I do not think he is convinced, like Kandinsky, that yellow seems to expand and approach, that blue contracts and recedes, that violet is sick and orange healthy; but it is undoubted that he chooses colours according to an internal, personal logic of his own, that he has created for himself a hierarchy of values and meanings (perhaps quite different from those of the Russian master) to which he rigorously adheres. The choice of colours is connected, together with much else, to the third point: the skilful use of the computer. Someone would be ashamed to admit that he uses the computer to lay down the sketch of a painting; not he. Besides, do architects not now draw on the computer everything they until recently drew by hand? Zakamoto writes: 'I use photographic images taken with a digital camera, then I produce a rough sketch by hand, with the computer I stylise the forms and choose the colours.' From the computer, moreover, come planets (including Earth and Saturn), little stars and other graphic signs. But I would point the finger at the phrase 'with the computer I stylise the forms.' Here is one way among many to seek the essential in a figure: not only does an attitude become immediately recognisable, but an emotion too is transmitted to us clearly and without possibility of misunderstanding. Goodness, emotions from a computer? Well yes: in the 21st century we cannot allow ourselves to see anything strange or unseemly in it. The method works. It should also be noted that the breaking-up of hands and faces (or parts of faces) into sharp areas of different colours, carried out by the computer, besides highlighting, as has been said, their essential characteristics, has the effect in a certain way of flattening them. If painting was for centuries, and for some still is, the feigning of three dimensions on a support that possesses only two, in Akira's human figures the third dimension ends up being symbolic, not actually represented in an attempt at trompe l'oeil as painters did for millennia, first those of ancient Rome and then the Europeans from Giotto onward.
If, instead of paintings depicting a face, Zakamoto's canvases were maps reproducing a mountainous territory, they would not be those that draw the peaks, ridges and valleys with hachures, but those that rely on contour lines: whoever uses the map well knows the meaning of the isohypses and, observing them, sees every characteristic of the relief, but to do so they have set in motion — probably without realising it — that part of the brain that is dedicated to the intelligence of symbols and not to the deciphering of images. And we are coming to the fourth ingredient of our pizza: the composition. With these human figures or their parts in the foreground, the beams of light arriving from above — from spaceships or islands floating in the ether — form a singular contrast. We all have in mind photographs in which the foreground is in focus, and therefore effectively feigns the third dimension, and the background is deliberately out of focus and therefore flat: any of us has surely used this technique more than once in portraits.
But in Zakamoto's canvases it is the foreground that turns out flat, for the reasons just given, while the beams of light (which recall those of a theatre spotlight, and therefore suggest to the observer's unconscious that this is a scene, that something is about to happen there) confer on the background a perfect three-dimensionality, worthy of the Renaissance painters and their floors of marble inlay which, converging toward the throne on which the inevitable Madonna and Child sat, had a not very different purpose. And since we are not used to a flat figure standing out before a three-dimensional background, the resulting effect is one of estrangement and slight disquiet. One might say that the true subject of the painting is not the child or the woman in the foreground, but the beam of cosmic light behind them. To the perspective suggested by the projectors hung from spaceships and space islands are added the original perspectives from top to bottom (a child's face as seen by an adult) and from bottom to top (the adult's face seen by the child). Strange to say, the solution, which may seem obvious, is anything but common: which other painters who have depicted children (there have been legions, and Zakamoto is rightly to be counted among them given the frequency of the subject in his paintings) had the idea of observing them in such a way? Mutatis mutandis, Mantegna's Dead Christ comes to mind, the most stupendous example of the application of an unusual perspective. At this point we have moved to the fifth ingredient: call it what you like, surrealism, metaphysical painting. Already the feeling of expectation, of something (but what?) that will surely happen shortly, is no novelty: it has been noted apropos of De Chirico's Italian Squares. But here and there Zakamoto goes well beyond.
Take a painting like The End of an Era: the impressive Earth with white continents and red oceans is, for a third, immersed in something blue… yes, but, goodness, in what? The sky may indeed be blue, but a planet cannot float in it as in the sea, applying Archimedes' principle! And so this Earth, red with blood, about to sink in an impossible cosmic sea, is a very close relative of the Solitary Swimmer — to stay with De Chirico — who with great strokes crosses his own room, weaving among the furniture. With a leap of era and of quality that is no small matter, we must nonetheless note that, alongside the lessons of great masters of painting, our artist kept in mind (how consciously?) the suggestions offered to him by cartoons, in particular the Japanese ones that were all the rage on TV when he was a child. Many scenes of his canvases seem frames from a cartoon: the child's face in the foreground with eyes and mouth strongly emphasised, the little stars, the spaceships… Here too, nothing scandalous and nothing new either: Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, the two greatest representatives of Pop art, began their careers drawing inspiration from comics, of which, moreover, the division of the image into sharp areas of colour, without gradations or overlaps, is typical.
But comics, cartoons, animated films are conceived — the name says so — to be drawn on paper. And here the sixth point comes into play: the support. Canvas has for centuries been the most obvious and banal of supports; it occurs to no one to notice its presence except when Lucio Fontana punctured or slashed it in search of the third dimension; but here one notices with astonishment that beneath the glossy enamels with which Zakamoto delineated his figures there is, precisely, a canvas. They would seem forms and scenes not for canvas; therefore the presence of the most classic of supports has an impact that is anything but negligible. It tells us: all right, spaceships, little stars, wide-eyed children, drowning planets… but beware, all this is not a cartoon nor a page of Tex or Mickey Mouse; it is a painting with all the proper credentials, and as such you must observe it. The emotion a painting can transmit to you is not the emotion a comic gives you, with all due respect to the latter: we are on different planes. If we connect this to what Zakamoto declares about his method of first elaborating the images on the computer, this passing, as a final act, to canvas, giving them the dignity of paintings, is in a certain way the opposite of the procedure that — in an age when no one had a PC at home — the adepts of Pop art followed: especially at the beginning they worked freehand, or with semi-artisanal techniques, trying to simulate the results given by the industrial processes used in the world of advertising. Typical is the case of Lichtenstein, who painted with a small brush through a perforated metal sheet to feign the graininess that the printing of a photo gives at the large dimensions of an advertising poster. And Warhol said: 'I want to be a machine, and I feel that when I do something… in the manner of a machine I get the result I want.' The opposite of Akira, who masterfully handles a sophisticated machine like the computers of the third millennium but… wants to be a painter. Seventh point.
Behind all the practical devices listed so far there exist theoretical convictions. One of the main ones is: we are all gods. (Incidentally, in the Gospel of John, Jesus, to silence those who accuse him of making himself the son of God, quotes a passage from the Old Testament that reads: I said: you are gods, wrong-footing his interlocutors.) Hence the idea of a performance on the occasion of which 'the visitors reappropriate their deity': Zakamoto interviews them, photographs them, elaborates the image on the computer inserting elements taken from the Internet, and turns it all into a postcard with the words 'I AM GOD,' to be put on the net on the artist's website.
That site will thus end up becoming something similar to Franco Vaccari's personal room at the 1972 Venice Biennale: visitors photographed themselves with a Polaroid and hung their image on the wall, so that by the end of the show there were thousands. Similar, but much more refined both graphically (no computer elaborations for Vaccari) and conceptually (there the visitors were simply invited to leave a trace of their passage; they were not promoted to gods). Eighth and final point. Luca Motolese was not content to change his first and last name: art history is full of painters who chose pseudonyms, and some are big names — think of Alberto Savinio. No, he even wrote himself a slightly demented Japanese autobiography, including an abduction by aliens (for otherwise how would there be so many spaceships and sidereal islands in his paintings?).
The reader half smiles, amused by this ironic mockery, and is half tempted to believe that, underneath, there is something serious: the allegory of a sudden and profound change in the artist's way of perceiving reality, due perhaps to some event no less traumatic than an abduction into space. The fact remains that the Japanese frame — to which the aforementioned cartoons are perhaps not unrelated — has its own charm; and from Italy to the Land of the Rising Sun, in the surname that changes — from Motolese to Zakamoto — the syllables MOTO fortunately remain unchanged, because it was evidently written in the stars that our man would become a motorcyclist… I began with an irreverence and I end with another: to me the pseudonym irresistibly recalls Tofusho Lamoto, the ridiculous Japanese motorcycling champion who, when I was young, featured in the advertisement for Doctor Ciccarelli's corn remover. As we have seen, what seemed an all in all simple dish (a Margherita pizza?) has instead revealed to us a number of ingredients we did not suspect. They were chosen and mixed with wisdom.
And surely the eight I have listed are not all: it is up to the reader to identify the others. They have illustrious precedents in the art history of the Twentieth Century and, in some cases, of previous centuries. This does not mean that Akira has pedantically copied others' ideas or techniques: it means that he is not a pretentious improviser, that he has solid foundations. Naturally it is not enough for there to be numerous good ingredients for a dish to turn out exquisite; but if the ingredients are few and bad, we cannot expect much… And so, are Zakamoto's paintings beautiful or ugly? If what Walter Gropius maintains is true — namely that beauty depends 'on the sure mastery of all the scientific, technical and formal requirements that constitute an organism' — they ought to be beautiful. But the question is futile. Tristan Tzara, the prophet of Dadaism, wrote that 'a work of art is never beautiful by decree of law, objectively, unanimously.' So you decide, reader, whether the square canvases of our pseudo-Japanese are to your liking.
I like them. My mother — who is the wife of a painter — does too. But at this point, if you have had the patience to follow me this far, you will understand that it is time to stop with words and to sit down at the table. 'To look at a painting one needs a chair,' Paul Klee maintained, but he did not advise also taking a knife, fork and napkin. Here, instead, the pizza is served: enjoy your meal!
And if it seems irreverent to you to compare a painting by Akira Zakamoto to an equally colourful four-seasons pizza, remember that twentieth-century art often had irreverence among its main characteristics: therefore speaking irreverently of an artist who lives astride the twentieth and twenty-first centuries seems perfectly legitimate to me. Let us discover, then, one by one, the ingredients. First: the format. Although Zakamoto does not disdain rectangular canvases, with notable frequency he uses square ones. In the exhibition Islands / The Strongholds of Dream (Rivoli 2003) there stood out an installation (so he called it, even if today the term suggests something quite different) made of twenty-four canvases of 50 by 50, titled The Future Returns, set against rare rectangular canvases. In the history of painting the square support is not the rule, but over the last hundred years there have been artists who preferred it. Kazimir Malevich, the prophet of Russian Suprematism, considered the black square 'the zero of forms' and attributed such importance to it that when he died a black square was placed at the head of his bed and another was painted on his tomb. If from the 1910s we move to the 1960s of the last century, Josef Albers's Homages to the Square are famous; Robert Ryman, the leader of Opaque Painting, painted only white squares; and Ad Reinhardt and Frank Stella too showed a marked predilection for the same form. Yet their painting was not figurative.
For those who instead want to fix a scene or a portrait on canvas, the rectangular format is almost obligatory, in the wake of the habit the camera gave us: with the fortunes of 6 x 6 film over, for decades the 24 x 36 format dominated, so that when you prepare to take a photo the first thing you think is: will the best framing be vertical or horizontal? Moving to digital cameras there was, in the absence of film, no real reason to continue with rectangles, but such was the habit that the choice was made to do so — also because the computer monitor, the television and the projector do not dream at all of giving you square images.
Zakamoto, therefore, goes against the current. It should be added that the square is a geometric figure laden with symbolic meanings: while the circle represents the sky, the square is the earth. But the discourse would take us too far. Second: the colours. The Japanese painter, or pseudo-such, does not mix them. No gradations. What is red is red, what is green is green. And since he uses enamels, which give you a uniform surface rather than one all highs and lows as oil colours do, the effect is heightened. He seems to say, with childish joy: colour is beautiful, let us enjoy it as it is; why mess it up, ruin it? But beware. The painter paints clearly recognisable forms; yet the colours are not necessarily those that nature and common sense suggest. A sky may indeed be blue, but it is by no means certain that it is; and if it is red, that does not mean it is a dawn or a sunset. The only concern is that the juxtapositions of these pure colours work: that they express what he has in mind to express. The rest does not matter: Zakamoto is as far from the obligatory use of natural colours as from the contrived search for unnatural colours for the sole purpose of astonishing.
I do not think he is convinced, like Kandinsky, that yellow seems to expand and approach, that blue contracts and recedes, that violet is sick and orange healthy; but it is undoubted that he chooses colours according to an internal, personal logic of his own, that he has created for himself a hierarchy of values and meanings (perhaps quite different from those of the Russian master) to which he rigorously adheres. The choice of colours is connected, together with much else, to the third point: the skilful use of the computer. Someone would be ashamed to admit that he uses the computer to lay down the sketch of a painting; not he. Besides, do architects not now draw on the computer everything they until recently drew by hand? Zakamoto writes: 'I use photographic images taken with a digital camera, then I produce a rough sketch by hand, with the computer I stylise the forms and choose the colours.' From the computer, moreover, come planets (including Earth and Saturn), little stars and other graphic signs. But I would point the finger at the phrase 'with the computer I stylise the forms.' Here is one way among many to seek the essential in a figure: not only does an attitude become immediately recognisable, but an emotion too is transmitted to us clearly and without possibility of misunderstanding. Goodness, emotions from a computer? Well yes: in the 21st century we cannot allow ourselves to see anything strange or unseemly in it. The method works. It should also be noted that the breaking-up of hands and faces (or parts of faces) into sharp areas of different colours, carried out by the computer, besides highlighting, as has been said, their essential characteristics, has the effect in a certain way of flattening them. If painting was for centuries, and for some still is, the feigning of three dimensions on a support that possesses only two, in Akira's human figures the third dimension ends up being symbolic, not actually represented in an attempt at trompe l'oeil as painters did for millennia, first those of ancient Rome and then the Europeans from Giotto onward.
If, instead of paintings depicting a face, Zakamoto's canvases were maps reproducing a mountainous territory, they would not be those that draw the peaks, ridges and valleys with hachures, but those that rely on contour lines: whoever uses the map well knows the meaning of the isohypses and, observing them, sees every characteristic of the relief, but to do so they have set in motion — probably without realising it — that part of the brain that is dedicated to the intelligence of symbols and not to the deciphering of images. And we are coming to the fourth ingredient of our pizza: the composition. With these human figures or their parts in the foreground, the beams of light arriving from above — from spaceships or islands floating in the ether — form a singular contrast. We all have in mind photographs in which the foreground is in focus, and therefore effectively feigns the third dimension, and the background is deliberately out of focus and therefore flat: any of us has surely used this technique more than once in portraits.
But in Zakamoto's canvases it is the foreground that turns out flat, for the reasons just given, while the beams of light (which recall those of a theatre spotlight, and therefore suggest to the observer's unconscious that this is a scene, that something is about to happen there) confer on the background a perfect three-dimensionality, worthy of the Renaissance painters and their floors of marble inlay which, converging toward the throne on which the inevitable Madonna and Child sat, had a not very different purpose. And since we are not used to a flat figure standing out before a three-dimensional background, the resulting effect is one of estrangement and slight disquiet. One might say that the true subject of the painting is not the child or the woman in the foreground, but the beam of cosmic light behind them. To the perspective suggested by the projectors hung from spaceships and space islands are added the original perspectives from top to bottom (a child's face as seen by an adult) and from bottom to top (the adult's face seen by the child). Strange to say, the solution, which may seem obvious, is anything but common: which other painters who have depicted children (there have been legions, and Zakamoto is rightly to be counted among them given the frequency of the subject in his paintings) had the idea of observing them in such a way? Mutatis mutandis, Mantegna's Dead Christ comes to mind, the most stupendous example of the application of an unusual perspective. At this point we have moved to the fifth ingredient: call it what you like, surrealism, metaphysical painting. Already the feeling of expectation, of something (but what?) that will surely happen shortly, is no novelty: it has been noted apropos of De Chirico's Italian Squares. But here and there Zakamoto goes well beyond.
Take a painting like The End of an Era: the impressive Earth with white continents and red oceans is, for a third, immersed in something blue… yes, but, goodness, in what? The sky may indeed be blue, but a planet cannot float in it as in the sea, applying Archimedes' principle! And so this Earth, red with blood, about to sink in an impossible cosmic sea, is a very close relative of the Solitary Swimmer — to stay with De Chirico — who with great strokes crosses his own room, weaving among the furniture. With a leap of era and of quality that is no small matter, we must nonetheless note that, alongside the lessons of great masters of painting, our artist kept in mind (how consciously?) the suggestions offered to him by cartoons, in particular the Japanese ones that were all the rage on TV when he was a child. Many scenes of his canvases seem frames from a cartoon: the child's face in the foreground with eyes and mouth strongly emphasised, the little stars, the spaceships… Here too, nothing scandalous and nothing new either: Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, the two greatest representatives of Pop art, began their careers drawing inspiration from comics, of which, moreover, the division of the image into sharp areas of colour, without gradations or overlaps, is typical.
But comics, cartoons, animated films are conceived — the name says so — to be drawn on paper. And here the sixth point comes into play: the support. Canvas has for centuries been the most obvious and banal of supports; it occurs to no one to notice its presence except when Lucio Fontana punctured or slashed it in search of the third dimension; but here one notices with astonishment that beneath the glossy enamels with which Zakamoto delineated his figures there is, precisely, a canvas. They would seem forms and scenes not for canvas; therefore the presence of the most classic of supports has an impact that is anything but negligible. It tells us: all right, spaceships, little stars, wide-eyed children, drowning planets… but beware, all this is not a cartoon nor a page of Tex or Mickey Mouse; it is a painting with all the proper credentials, and as such you must observe it. The emotion a painting can transmit to you is not the emotion a comic gives you, with all due respect to the latter: we are on different planes. If we connect this to what Zakamoto declares about his method of first elaborating the images on the computer, this passing, as a final act, to canvas, giving them the dignity of paintings, is in a certain way the opposite of the procedure that — in an age when no one had a PC at home — the adepts of Pop art followed: especially at the beginning they worked freehand, or with semi-artisanal techniques, trying to simulate the results given by the industrial processes used in the world of advertising. Typical is the case of Lichtenstein, who painted with a small brush through a perforated metal sheet to feign the graininess that the printing of a photo gives at the large dimensions of an advertising poster. And Warhol said: 'I want to be a machine, and I feel that when I do something… in the manner of a machine I get the result I want.' The opposite of Akira, who masterfully handles a sophisticated machine like the computers of the third millennium but… wants to be a painter. Seventh point.
Behind all the practical devices listed so far there exist theoretical convictions. One of the main ones is: we are all gods. (Incidentally, in the Gospel of John, Jesus, to silence those who accuse him of making himself the son of God, quotes a passage from the Old Testament that reads: I said: you are gods, wrong-footing his interlocutors.) Hence the idea of a performance on the occasion of which 'the visitors reappropriate their deity': Zakamoto interviews them, photographs them, elaborates the image on the computer inserting elements taken from the Internet, and turns it all into a postcard with the words 'I AM GOD,' to be put on the net on the artist's website.
That site will thus end up becoming something similar to Franco Vaccari's personal room at the 1972 Venice Biennale: visitors photographed themselves with a Polaroid and hung their image on the wall, so that by the end of the show there were thousands. Similar, but much more refined both graphically (no computer elaborations for Vaccari) and conceptually (there the visitors were simply invited to leave a trace of their passage; they were not promoted to gods). Eighth and final point. Luca Motolese was not content to change his first and last name: art history is full of painters who chose pseudonyms, and some are big names — think of Alberto Savinio. No, he even wrote himself a slightly demented Japanese autobiography, including an abduction by aliens (for otherwise how would there be so many spaceships and sidereal islands in his paintings?).
The reader half smiles, amused by this ironic mockery, and is half tempted to believe that, underneath, there is something serious: the allegory of a sudden and profound change in the artist's way of perceiving reality, due perhaps to some event no less traumatic than an abduction into space. The fact remains that the Japanese frame — to which the aforementioned cartoons are perhaps not unrelated — has its own charm; and from Italy to the Land of the Rising Sun, in the surname that changes — from Motolese to Zakamoto — the syllables MOTO fortunately remain unchanged, because it was evidently written in the stars that our man would become a motorcyclist… I began with an irreverence and I end with another: to me the pseudonym irresistibly recalls Tofusho Lamoto, the ridiculous Japanese motorcycling champion who, when I was young, featured in the advertisement for Doctor Ciccarelli's corn remover. As we have seen, what seemed an all in all simple dish (a Margherita pizza?) has instead revealed to us a number of ingredients we did not suspect. They were chosen and mixed with wisdom.
And surely the eight I have listed are not all: it is up to the reader to identify the others. They have illustrious precedents in the art history of the Twentieth Century and, in some cases, of previous centuries. This does not mean that Akira has pedantically copied others' ideas or techniques: it means that he is not a pretentious improviser, that he has solid foundations. Naturally it is not enough for there to be numerous good ingredients for a dish to turn out exquisite; but if the ingredients are few and bad, we cannot expect much… And so, are Zakamoto's paintings beautiful or ugly? If what Walter Gropius maintains is true — namely that beauty depends 'on the sure mastery of all the scientific, technical and formal requirements that constitute an organism' — they ought to be beautiful. But the question is futile. Tristan Tzara, the prophet of Dadaism, wrote that 'a work of art is never beautiful by decree of law, objectively, unanimously.' So you decide, reader, whether the square canvases of our pseudo-Japanese are to your liking.
I like them. My mother — who is the wife of a painter — does too. But at this point, if you have had the patience to follow me this far, you will understand that it is time to stop with words and to sit down at the table. 'To look at a painting one needs a chair,' Paul Klee maintained, but he did not advise also taking a knife, fork and napkin. Here, instead, the pizza is served: enjoy your meal!