Luigi Ontani

The “fixed performances”, “living paintings”, and natural size photographic reproductions, the exclusive object of the solo show devoted to Luigi Ontani, and curated by Giacinto Di Pietrantonio at the GAMeC in Bergamo and titled, with singular irony puns being the formulas of his circus.

Born in Vergato, a village in Emilia Romagna once the “homeland of Guido Reni, below the Montovolo in the river Reno valley”. In an interview he states, with his smooth pythonic voice and characteristic Romagnola “s”: “My landscapes are the same Tuscan-Emilian Appenines as Morandi’s, landmarked by Bologna, where I lived as a commuter guest”.

At the age of 14 he was employed at Macceferri, a local wire factory. In 1963 he went to Turin to join the army, and to seek comfort among spirits similar to his, at the gallery run by Luciano Pistoi. He feasted on the writings of Apollinaire, Savinio, Palazzeschi, Pirandello and Comisso. He attended no art schools, only a life class. At Studio Bentivoglio in Bologna, he recorded his first Super 8 films. He invented his Pleonastic objects (scaly coloured casts of chocolate boxes and egg cartons, talcum and face powder jars; sculptures in cardboard and blue-pink foam rubber). He published poems stuffed with neologisms and calembours in the newspaper Il Resto del Carlino.

Luigi Ontani, <i>VanITA</i>, 1997 — Luigi Ontani, *VanITA*, 1997

When he was 26 he let himself be convinced by his best pawns, gave up his job and left Vergato to roll and tumble in Rome, where he rented a house with Sandro Chia. He grew more diaphanous. With carneval contrivances he inebriated the unwary and tinged with slices of life the felt walls of reality. He travelled to exotic places like Bali, and dressed in a bizarre style (“I like colours, and since I can’t turn myself into a chamelion I dress in cloths bought in India and Thailand where my favourite tailors live”). In 1974 his flute snores grew more acute in Fabio Sargentini’s Attic garage, where his Romagnola “s” was printed on the red-blue costume of the father of all superheroes (Superman), until it was transformed into a single extended note (the Tarzan yell) in the underground car park at Villa Borghese, the somewhat outrageous premises of Achile Bonito Oliva’s mythic “Contemporanea”.

Luigi Ontani, <i>San Sebastiano d'après Guido Reni</i>, 1970 — Luigi Ontani, *San Sebastiano d'après Guido Reni*, 1970

It is in this bend of Luigi Ontani’s biographical river (but nothing like the somnolent splashing of a greyish and withered biograph can in any way frame the character’s gaudy histrionics) that the beginning of that recherche may be situated. From there he moved on to the “fixed performances”, “living paintings”, and natural size photographic reproductions, the exclusive object of this solo show at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Bergamo and titled, with singular irony, “er” “SIMULACRUM” “amo” (puns being the formulas of his circus). A mot-valise that reminds one of a neon sign (“Bergamo”) with broken lamps, where the void of a syllabication is occupied by the whole sense and weight of “truth that hides the fact that it has none at all” – yes, Baudrillard.

Luigi Ontani, <i>Ecco Homo</i>, 1970 — Luigi Ontani, *Ecco Homo*, 1970

Ontani has no taste other than for himself, for the mise-en-scène, the contrivance, the cosmesis. In the past forty years he has squeezed the lemon of his imagination to the last drop, ripening his desire to sink unimpeded into the altar of his own ego, seeking refuge in the impudent cadence that has made him famous. “Long live art!” sings the answering service of his home in Rome, once the studio of Antonio Canova and in which a radio permanently turned on pours classical music into the air at all hours. Terribly eccentric, but also bitter, ambivalent and funny, brutal, obscene, stylish and cultivated, enchanting, mysterious, decadent, surreal and tragicomic, Ontani very much gives the impression of having managed to preserve, in the obsessive instability of his identity, that bridge of childhood from which to gaze at the world with wonder while succeeding, needless to say, in making things wondrous.”

“I envy his walking on earth with those enormously soled boa shoes with such infinite lightness and irony”, remarked Goffredo Parise. Disguise is his oldest flirtation. Nothing amuses him more than to step into other people’s shoes, be they of Pinocchio, Dante Alighieri, Giacomo Casanova, Garibaldi, Georges de La Tour, Narcissus, Bacchus, St Sebastian, Adam and Eve, Cupid, St Luke, St Jerome, the archangel Gabriel, or Jesus himself – and the list could be much longer.

Luigi Ontani, <i>GaribalDi Onore</i>, 2003 — Luigi Ontani, *GaribalDi Onore*, 2003

“Looking into the mirror, which says: you were duped, velvet face”. Ontani’s work consists almost entirely of this quip, as proven by the exhibition at the GAMeC, frozen in silent movie poses and as packed with simulacra as a church full of Sunday worshippers (“Stereotypes of knowledge and forgetting”). Here, again and again the same face, with the unmistakable mole on the right cheek, is repeated like the commas of a long sentence: Ontani with the crown of thorns (Ecce Homo, 1970). Ontani with a snake in his mouth (Stravizi capitalistici, 1970). Ontani the wingless angel holding a lily (Annunciation, 1973). Ontani king of the hour-glasses with an owl, a seagull, a peacock and a crocodile (Le Ore, 1975). Ontani with a laurel wreath; with sceptre and thunderbolts; a bow and arrow; helmet and sword; cloak and trident (Olimpo, 1975). Ontani with a tortoise on his head (Pure’zza, 1996), a moth in his mouth (Distrazione, 1997), a headgear of daffodils (VanITA, 1997). Ontani with the twins Romulus and Remus (Lapsus Lupus, 1998). Ontani with a monkey’s skull as a sceptre (SanGerolaMonkey), 2000), dressed as a Harlequin (CiniComico, 2007), and finally almost naked, in the pose that was De Chirico’s (SenilSemiNudo, 2011). “I seized the iron to remove the wrinkles from the gigantic body in which I have lived for a long time. A butterfly with its lovely colours distracted me for a while”.

Luigi Ontani, <i>San Sebastiano Indiano</i>, 1976 — Luigi Ontani, *San Sebastiano Indiano*, 1976

It is in this human pickle that the whole of Luigi Ontani’s art is defined, as a man inhabited by unreality, unconquerable, an x straining towards infinity. “In his way, a sultan” (again Parise). On the ground floor, in the museum’s entrance hall, a photograph of discreet extravagance, of those fossils that wittily change their appearance according to the incidence of light to give the illusion of movement (Soap bubbles, 1968), can be contemplated open-mouthed as a feu follet. A small picture of a relaxing and soignée beauty, which anticipates this exhibition and absorbs crepuscular poetry while vivifying its magic spell. A young Ontani, rustling in a talcum-white suit and as if stricken by a lack of muscular coordination, moves with rapid jerks on a pocket of undergrowth of a starched pale blue reminiscent of a late-19^th century painting by Corot. From a barely different angle, the artist can be observed changing pose and profile, right-left, up-down, like a sunflower that doesn’t know which way to turn. The head rotates here and there, while its breath multiplies cascades of water and soap bubbles like a conjurer’s rabbits. One by one, the magic spheres of opaline foam pour their coloured syrup into the air and turn and turn and run in a contest without a finishing post. And for a moment, one has the sensation of seeing them slide silently beyond the gilt frame, and of recognising, among the trembling pink-green-mauve, turquoise flashes, the unconscious and smashed image of Ontani frolicking like a bewitched prince in a liquefied rainbow.

until 11 January 2015
Luigi Ontani. “er” “SIMULÀCRUM” “amò”
GAMeC, Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea
via San Tomaso 53, Bergamo

Luigi Ontani

The “fixed performances”, “living paintings”, and natural size photographic reproductions, the exclusive object of the solo show devoted to Luigi Ontani, and curated by Giacinto Di Pietrantonio at the GAMeC in Bergamo and titled, with singular irony puns being the formulas of his circus.

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