Portrait of Giovane Tennista - Pordenone Montanari
I’ve been looking again at the work of recently-discovered Italian artist and recluse, Pordenone Montanari. That first glimpse of the fresco of the two figures squatting beneath the window was compelling – the expanding gallery of his paintings as they were released onto the web intriguing. A select exhibition of fifty of his works are still on display in London at the Italian Cultural Insitute until Oct. 6th. He has been described as fitting into no major school of contemporary practise, but instead shows strong affinity with the school of “High Modernist figurative art”; in other words, his art hails back to that golden era of modernism – the pre-war decades when it seemed fresh, new and significant. Perhaps too, it harks back to a time when modernism and all it stood for seemed to stand for – inventive, radical energy – was poised to really change the world.
It did. Modernism did change the world – but the world we now live in, the world created by modernist approaches to art, literature, society and life, is perhaps not the radical new Arcadia dreamed of in the early twentieth century. The promise of technology, the liberalising of intellectual and social milleux – none of this has really transformed either our social or human condition. Instead, we are now entering a new nineteenth century, where social conservatism, unrestrained private capitalism and a new form of political and ethnic imperialism are all gaining mainstream support, even among so-called liberals.
Perhaps those of us who are wary of this trend, who admire the original fundamentals and principle of modernism, admired its radicalism and its transformative vision, might want to revisit that in our art. Perhaps its time for a new modernism.
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