Over Leonora Carrington_Distractions

The double nursery

The installation was designed site-specific for the Sala Steccata of the Governor's Palace in Parma –an exhibition space facing the walls of the Basilica of Santa Maria della Steccata –, triggering a powerful reflection with Parmigianino's frescoes in the presbytery's attic, frescoes depicting Three Wise Virgins and Three Foolish Virgins in surprising symmetry with the female figures featured in Leonora Carrington's work.

Parmigianino's six virgins, whose interest in alchemy – another analogy with Carrington's sensibility - haunted the latter part of life, penetrate Leonora's oblique, tender and cruel world, transfiguring in the performers' psychological_body a double pictorial and literary universe.

In the bare space of the room float between the visual waves transmuted by Parmigianino's virgins and the sonic ripples of Bach's sacred cantata "Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme” (Wake up, the voice is calling us!) referring to the same parable, the plastic bodies of six kajaks, milky cradles for the performers suspended between the inconsistency of reality and the desire for the unknown.

Wake up

In the transition from Bach to contemporaneity, singing transforms into a sensory territory in which tradition cracks and renews itself.

“Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme”, conceived as a choral piece, is collected here in a single voice: a sonic thread that carries within it the echo of a collective awakening.

On stage, the six performers restore a visual chorality to the singing that expands beyond the sound.

The solitary timbre thus becomes a plural organism, a call that passes through the bodies, the lights, the projected images.

The music, stripped of all accompaniment, entrusts the voice with the task of exploring new intensities: whispers, sudden bursts that are interspersed with moments of silence that are almost deafening. Between baroque memory and experimental tension, the song shatters and recomposes itself, becoming living matter, a call that cannot be ignored.

White wait

What is the use of beauty? – to wait for death?

What does it wrap around, what morphological ivy does it cling to, why still the nascent necessity, princess establishing matter?

How to renounce their indelibility except by incurably becoming ill with their likeness.

Chilling neuropathy.

Everything is paralyzed in the perfect mirror of the pathetic-pathological incipit.

It is free because it is dying in them, aesthetic tingling, asthenia, and after some apparent static time the epiphany of the acute syndrome.

To the point that it is only painful to exist outside of that approach to dying.

What if they were the ones who were re-formed to her?

Attentive to the viral spread of evil.

That's why it's expanding during the pandemic.

Roundabouts, buzzing, useless murmurs. They often mutter.

Remember that it is forbidden to commit suicide - forbidden space – clandestinity – faceless secret – opaque area – you escape the show. Going back: getting sick and waiting.

Who is distracted?

Who is distracted? The inexperienced of the world? The sick girl at the beginning, the goat to slit the throat, the Easter Monday baby girl, the one found inside the broken egg? The chocolate puffs eater?

Not her herself, far from the galleys of performance, but she in them, but they in her, as if riding her full of joy with purple bridles.

They are she – human matter – her cries, her tantrums, her laughter, her spasms. And so they are tinged with the pallors of welcome misfortunes that they together are: genetic exception resistant to evil since they were born in evil or destined for it.

Wrong nates can't go wrong, that's what makes them infallible unconsciousness.

Imagoturgy for Distractions

A quick and light video shot, inside the Church of Santa Maria della Steccata, like a common visitor, with his head up towards the Sottarco, as a participant in that dance of the virgins' hands and arms.

Three virgins who have come to carry the oil lamp, to illuminate the arrival of the Groom, and three who lack that light that will not illuminate any path of redemption. Despite the separation of the figures in the fresco, testifying to their different sacred function, in the live shot we dance under the Subarch to gain an overall vision, a semicircular movement of the body that further lengthens the female figures already outstretched with arms and hands.

In the visual transfiguration obtained, this virtual ensemble produces a re-definition of the roles, the three figures together with the other three are placed, in composition/mounting on a single frontal plane, with an artificial movement of vertical sliding, with the addition of a slight water effect. The water that reflects, that refracts.

Imagoturgy underlies and participates in performative action. The primary sign takes on a new form, with the body it becomes an ensemble action, only for the duration of the performance. The ultimate goal of imagoturgy.

The six transparent boats and the six navigating actresses thus become the new forms, and respond to the immobile gestures of virgins with a new aesthetic and compositional function, life in motion. From a detail of the painting, of only one of the four elements present – the water – the object of investigation expands beyond the canvas, multiplies the boat and the female figure who guides it, already navigating beyond the frame.

The six vertical video paintings, like floating waves, will reflect six visual altarpieces of Parmigianino's virgins onto the walls of the room, in asynchronous movements aimed at composing a single fresco, pushing the characteristic of pictorial lengthening to excess and further asymmetry.

Parmigianino like Carrington, like paraphilosophical writing, like the site-specific installation to compose an experimental symphony of dis-traction, of lengthening pictorial forms, of bodies and driving forces that produce experimental, aesthetic and poetic energy, dragging the performance into a metaphysical elsewhere.

Les Distractions de Dagobert from 1945 is among Leonora Carrington's most significant works.

A great surrealist journey inside a single painting. Les Distractions de Dagobert is one of the symbolic works of the dream movement, a set of visions and imaginative suggestions that best exemplify the poetics of the current codified by André Breton in 1924.

Les Distractions de Dagobert allegorically and allusively represents the life of Dagobert, the Merovingian king who ruled Gaul at the beginning of the 7th century, popularly remembered as a dissolute ruler, with a marked taste for sexual excess and an unbridled love of luxury. Carrington narrates the figure by setting up an elaborate tableau divided into four sections representing the four elements: Earth, Air, Fire and Water.

Within each panel, Dagobert's spirit is metaphorically detailed by referring to the most disparate subjects: from ghostly volcanoes and lakes of fire to aquatic worlds dominated by a two-faced giant holding a pufferfish with human features. These are references that draw from disparate influences, such as Irish mythology, alchemical theories, Kabbalah and above all indigenous Mexican cosmology. The work, in fact, was painted in 1945, two years after Carrington's arrival in Mexico, which by mid-century had become the second homeland of Surrealism, after Paris.

It is no coincidence that in 1942 Carrington chose the central American country, a surrealist oasis where he could express himself with more freedom than he could in Europe under the aegis of Breton, a priest at times despotic of the movement. Once in Mexico City she joined the Surrealist “exiled” community of Remedios Varo, Wolfgang Paalen, Alice Rahon and others, as well as modern Mexican painters such as Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Miguel Covarrubias and Carlos Mérida. Les Distractions de Dagobert is the symbolic work of this period of Carrington's Mexican revival, where he contaminates the European heritage –from Bosch to Bruegel– with local influences.

She was born in Chorley, Great Britain, on 6 April 1917 into an upper-middle-class family. He began his artistic career at a young age: after learning the first notions of painting in Florence, she returned to England and moved to London in 1936, where she attended first the Chelsea School of Arts and then the painting courses taught by Amédée Ozenfant at the academy of the same name.

A year later he meets Max Ernst: she is nineteen and Ernst forty-six. Together they leave for France, where he comes into contact with the protagonists of Surrealism, including Jean Arp, André Breton, and Yves Tanguy. After living in Paris on Rue Jacob, a short distance from Pablo Picasso's home, Carrington and Ernst moved to Saint-Martin d'Ardèche, where they remained until the outbreak of the Second World War.

During the war, Ernst was taken prisoner because his German nationality made him a foreign enemy in France, and Carrington fled to Spain, where, following a serious exhaustion, she was interned in a psychiatric hospital.

Her experiences are recounted in Down Below (1944), a book the artist wrote at Breton's suggestion. Writing is an activity he continues and deepens, creating a personal style inspired by the themes and dreamlike visions of Surrealism. An important figure among the Surrealists in exile in the United States, Carrington is considered something of a muse by more than one painter.

After the war she married a diplomat, Renato Leduc, and with him she moved first to New York in 1941 and the following year to Mexico, where she remained for forty years. Mexico is the ideal country for the development of its art, rich in enigmatic and mythological figures linked to the world of the archaeological past and especially to the world of religious myths.

Despite her European origins, Carrington is recognized as one of the major figures of Latin American Surrealism. The artist died in Mexico City on May 25, 2011.